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Introduction Introduction
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Four Detours Through the Past: Traversing Paradigms in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
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Published:February 2022
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Abstract
Demonstrating how the concerns of early writers publishing during Jim Crow finds continuity in the fiction published by post-segregation, post-civil rights writers, the fourth chapter considers travel as literary device in Octavia Butler’s speculative novel Kindred. Grounded by historical research on enslavement, Kindred uses the trope of time travel in a way that troubles easy distinctions between the figure of the enslaved and the traveler and reveals the paradox of freedom and confinement as an almost inescapable dialectic that continues to persist even given a speculative trope that seemingly holds out the possibility of altering history. Reading Kindred against contemporaneous works employing the speculative trope of time travel, the chapter argues that Butler’s representation of time travel (particularly as she dissociates time travel from technology) forces her readers to confront experiences of enslaved Africans in the antebellum South and continuities of those experiences of freedom and confinement as they persist during Jim Crow and into the novel’s present (1976). Even more, Butler presents her narrative from the perspective an African American woman Dana who is married to a European American man Kevin, encouraging readers to also examine issues of gender and race in both the novel’s present and historical past.
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