Authors: Surbhi Bankolia
Abstract: Octavia Butler’s Kindred rewrites the history of American slavery through the disruptive narrative device of time travel, compelling a contemporary Black woman to experience the antebellum South firsthand. This paper examines how Butler uses temporal displacement to collapse the boundaries between past and present, revealing slavery not as a distant historical event but as a lived and continuing influence on Black identity and memory. Through Dana’s repeated, involuntary journeys into the past, Kindred transforms history into an embodied experience, where trauma is inscribed on the body and survival demands constant negotiation within systems of racial and patriarchal power. The study argues that Butler challenges conventional slave narratives by emphasizing survival over heroic resistance, portraying agency as a complex and often morally ambiguous process shaped by fear, obligation, and kinship. Memory in Kindred functions not merely as recollection but as a force that actively shapes the present, suggesting that the legacy of slavery persists through intergenerational trauma and inherited responsibility. By linking Dana’s modern consciousness to her ancestral past, Butler exposes the illusion of historical progress and confronts readers with the ethical necessity of remembering. Drawing on trauma theory, Black feminist thought, and speculative fiction studies, this paper demonstrates how Kindred reimagines historical fiction as a site of confrontation rather than comfort. Ultimately, Butler’s novel insists that understanding survival under slavery requires acknowledging the intimate, painful entanglement of history, memory, and identity, and that confronting this past is essential to understanding the present.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18205687
