A contested freedom:The fragile future of Octavia Butler's Kindred

Abstract

Most scholarship that addresses Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred ([1979] 1988. Massachusetts: Beacon Press) focuses on its value as a forerunner of the neo-slave narrative in African-American literature, and thus the manner in which traces of the past affect the protagonist's present in the novel. However, given Butler's established fixation with the future, I contend that one may also read Kindred from a futurist perspective. I find that Butler's vision of the future in this novel is pessimistic in that the protagonist fails to resist the white, patriarchal authority perpetuated in patrilinear time in a definitive manner, so that the liberatory trajectory of the novel ultimately fails. Because of this, Butler's pessimistic vision of the future is one in which racism and sexism may well continue to haunt African-American experience.

Key words:

• Afrofuturism
• Octavia Butler
• feminist agency
• feminist futures
• feminist science fiction
• feminist speculative fiction
• Kindred
• patrilinear time
• postmodern slave narrative
• second wave feminism
• time travel

Notes

1 It is important to note that Nahin, Barr and Attebery's comments do not describe the entirety of feminist SF. Even during the early years of SF there were female authors who refuted the claim that the ‘hard sciences’ were not for women. Certainly, on the one hand there is the tradition of feminist utopian SF that tends towards worlds in which technology is ‘evil’ and ‘patriarchal’, and women must create peaceful lives, living in perfect symbiosis with nature (Sally M. Gearheart's The Wanderground [1985] and Suzy McKee Charnas's first Holdfast novel [1974] are examples of this). But there is also a body of writing in which female authors ‘explore how new technologies could change social relations’ (Yaszek 2009, 237). In this SF, science is not shunned but claimed and practised by female characters in direct defiance of the male moratorium on women in science.

Additional information

EILEEN DONALDSON is a member of the Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa. Her fields of interest span the gamut of speculative and gothic fictions, as well as children's literature. She has published articles and book chapters on Roald Dahl,Terry Pratchett, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin.