Analysis Of Kindred By Octavia Butler

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Displacement, in its various manifestations, can refer to a sense of being physically, socially or culturally out of place. It is associated with a sense of loss, alienation, and dislocation depending on the contextual circumstances in which it happens, and can take many forms like migration, exile, enslavement, imprisonment, diaspora and travel. The Black diaspora constituted by the displacement across the globe, particularly across the Atlantic, signifies the physical and cultural dislocation which transformed both the individual and collective identities of the African denizens. Its implications are often explored in narratives of historical and cultural interrogation, revision and reconfigurations, through the discourses of pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism and Afrocentricity. The globalized black experience, informed by collective cultural identity, shared history, common experience of racial oppression and marginalization by racist ideologies, is represented in narratives transforming it into a discourse of subversion and resistance. The novel, Kindred, by the Afro-American writer Octavia Butler, employs the fantastic element of time travel to present the Black diasporic experience as a continuum which forms a link between the cultural past and the present day hybridized identities. Dana, the Black female protagonist of the narrative, finds herself sporadically travelling between her present day life in 1976 California and the antebellum South plantation in 1815