Octavia Butler Kindred Summary

Literary critic Thelma Shinn Richard has said that “colonialism has inscribed its history on every African-American body and mind.” This is certainly evident in the science fiction slave narrative Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. One of Butler’s primary reasons for writing Kindred, perhaps subconsciously, may have been to try to receive closure about any white slave-owning ancestors she possibly had in her family tree. Creating the story of Dana Franklin, a modern black woman traveling through time to save her lineage from extinction, allows Butler to illustrate the ways in which some of the oppression that took place during the period of American slavery has carried over into later years, and the fact that many parallels can be drawn between

Octavia Butler grew up in Pasadena, California during the 1940s and 1950s. “An only child, raised by her mother and grandmother” (Govan “Overview”), she often spent time by herself, mostly through reading and writing. Butler gained an interest in science fiction after exposure to books and movies in the genre, asserting that she “could write a better story than that” (Govan “Overview”). Butler has also remarked that she found science fiction to be a challenging and engaging genre to write because she could completely invert societal norms concerning race and gender to examine the overarching theme of colonialism (Richard). Kindred, the only one of her books to delve into historical fiction, extensively employs this

All her main characters are black women, with women of all races playing important roles as villains and side characters. The versatility of speculative fiction makes it possible for Butler to analyze Western norms about black women from two different time periods, and to prove “what life was like for a Black woman, even if she were nominally free” (Govan “Homage”). Kindred uses black feminist theory as an integral method to analyze the many ways black women in the present share common hardships with those in the past, and reminds readers that, as of 1979, slavery had been legal for just over two-thirds of the United States’ history. Despite somewhat similar circumstances, Dana’s demeanor is different from that of Sarah, a cook and a mother figure to the other slaves. For example, Dana is still hopeful about returning to 1976, but enslavement is all Sarah has ever