...Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” is one of those books that leave you thinking about it long after you have finished reading it. Told in an unpretentious tone, “Kindred” delivers a powerful message and makes the reader question everything they knew about slavery. Most modern people may never have thought about slavery or how easily one can come to accept it as a fact of life, until reading “Kindred”. Time travel makes it possible for Dana, a modern young, intelligent Black woman, to go back to the antebellum South and experience the nefarious effects of slavery. She does not go there by choice, but is, instead, pulled back in time by a mysterious phenomenon activated by one of her ancestors’ intense pain. Furthermore, she can return to her own time, 1976, only by experiencing pain or being in a highly anxiety-filled life- or- death situation. A young white boy by the name of Rufus, who is to become one of her ancestors, finds himself in trouble and Dana goes to his rescue time and time again. Although in the beginning she goes unwillingly, the reader can see that as time passes Dana begins to care for him, and genuinely wants to help him, even though he doesn’t always deserve her affection and dedication: the good-natured child Rufus...
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...The novel “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler covers the topic of the strengths of the black women and the suffering of African Americans. In the narration, the author enlightens several vital social aspects as racism, gender discrimination, and slavery. The aim of the following paper is to analyze the ways Butler expresses the topic of slavery regarding concepts of past and present, the distinguishing of slavery and freedom, and the principle of social unawareness which are utilized to enhance the impact of the book on the target reader. The book involves real historical background and fantastic elements which make it exceptional among the same genre novels. The protagonist is Dana, a black young woman, who experiences time traveling. The...
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...Kindred CRR: Question 4 The Underground Railroad is not only a passage for enslaved African Americans to escape to freedom in the North, but it also carried their stories with them so that they could be heard. In the novel “Kindred” by Octavia Butler, Dana travels back and forth from the antebellum South to the future, creating her own Underground Railroad where she brings the true brutality of the past South into her own life in the future. She is able to witness beatings, view the relationship between slaves and masters, and even see how slavery effects the enslaved, but also escape so that she can carry on their history. The story has many parallels with that of the Underground Railroad, even Kevin is affected, witnessing a woman die during...
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...said, “Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a social animal.” Throughout Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reader sees the main character Dana get herself into dangerous interactions due to her initial ignorance that she is time traveling back to the slavery era, where she works for a slave owner during her time in the antebellum South. Some of those moments are when Dana fights a slave owner to protect a freed slave who is married to a slave who escaped, another would be when Dana gets whipped for holding a spelling test that a younger slave took, also when Dana tries to pass for a slave owned by her...
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...extent of seeing the true gory. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Jessica Viñas-Nelson’s ‘Post-Racial’ America”, they both encompass that gory through their thematic message; many people encounter mishaps such as discrimination due to their gender and race solely based on their identity and societal expectations. In Butler’s novel, Kindred, Dana travels back...
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...Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, describes the impossible life of Dana Franklin. Dana and her husband, Kevin, go through a series of events that include time travelling and ensuring her birth by helping her ancestors, Rufus Weylin and Alice Greenwood. Throughout the novel, the reader is introduced to slavery through a progressive black female’s perspective. Dana is forced into slavery again and again, ultimately and unfortunately learning the ways of the South in the pre-Civil War era. She acts the part of slave for the sake of survival and adjusts quickly while trying to alter the thinking of Rufus with little success. Although slaves had similar jobs and enslaved women worked mostly in the domestic sphere, black women tolerated harsher labor...
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...While reading, the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s book, “Kindred”, I had to recognize the fact that it is not a story without a genre. In fact, the story is considered a neo-slave narrative, which is a story about the wounds slavery left on America. An example of these wounds is within the epilogue of the story when the main character, Dana, attempts to search for the truth about what happened to the people she met on her journey to the past; however, she is unable to find anything that would give her reassurance that she was not crazy. Dana’s inability to find proof shows how blacks lost their history while they were slaves, since no one recorded the life of a slave unless they were sold or “found” by the slave catchers....
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...In his critical essay about Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, Robert Crossley comments on the inaccurate nature of first-person American slave narratives. Dana, argues Crossley, “scorns the image of the plantation derived from Gone with the Wind, but she also learns the inadequacy of even the best books as preparation for her firsthand experience of slavery” (Crossley 276). According to Crossley, Dana learns quickly that the romanticized, rose-colored stories of the antebellum South are far from accurate. However, she also learns that regardless of the factual accuracy of the books, she is incapable of fully understanding the emotions of slaves. Crossley makes the claim that modern media is entirely insufficient at portraying the emotional...
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...Power Strategies in Kindred In Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, issues of misused power are prevalent. Through time travel between the 1970s and the 1800s, the book, Kindred, has shown major differences in lifestyle between an era of slavery and modern culture. The slave owners shun the slaves if they did not listen to their demands. Many of the slave owners use violence in order to control others. Slaves are mistreated with violence for something as small as not bringing back enough food from the fields, or not cleaning enough. The violence that is used is mainly whipping, hitting, yelling, and cutting off their fingers or ears. Despite the misuse of power, Dana, the protagonist, resists the violence through time travel. Throughout the book there...
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...Lenny Eguiluz Dr Holden English 1B 12, April, 12 Stronger than ever In Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred Dana and Kevin have an interracial marriage. Throughout the novel they have their ups and downs. It was not easy form them to be together because they were looked down upon for being in an interracial marriage. In the midst of opposing relationships such as, slave and master, black and white, there is a merge, a union known as Dana and Kevin’s marriage. Dana and Kevin meet at the temp agency where she and he worked at As Kevin and Dana grow closer and spend more time together in the twentieth century. Butler’s creative approach of concealing the couple’s individual racial identities in the beginning of the navel allowed us to truly understand the authentic nature of their marriage and emphasized the humanity in Dana and Kevin’s relationship while constructing the groundwork that would eventually be tested in the twentieth century as well as the seventeenth century. Dana and Kevin had to face a lot of opposition form their family and society it was not easy for them but they managed to stick by each other. Dana and Kevin have had to face many obstacles that where put in their way. Some of the obstacles that are in their way are family, time travel, and Rufus. Dana and Kevin had a lot of obstacles that many would say would harm a marriage. One of the many obstacles that they had was their family disapproval of their marriage. Dana and Kevin where...
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