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Kindred By Octavia Butler: Literary Analysis

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The novel Kindred by Octavia Butler examines issues of racism and slavery throughout America by depicting an African American woman named Dana who, through forced time travel, finds herself in the antebellum south. This story focuses on the violence, exploitation, and abuse of black people in the past. However, through Dana and Kevin's relationship, the novel speculates on the systemic impact racism has systemically on contemporary society. This is highlighted through the struggles present within their interracial marriage and how their dynamics parallel the racism present throughout the book. Kindred explores the ways in which systemic racism has affected and continues to impact society. The novel sheds light on the ways institutionalized …show more content…

This causes lasting marks on her as she sees that her family relationship cannot overcome her racial identity, as Rufus has power over her simply because he is white. He reminds her that if she had not been bought by him, she would have been beaten like the couple she had seen previously. Kevin's power is taken away when Dana is sold, and this has a lasting impact on their relationship. It showcases Kevin's inability to protect her from the violence and racism within society, further highlighting a divide between the two as individuals. This forces Dana to have awareness and fear when in the past and present of how her blackness affects her life because "Nothing in her education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape" (Butler) the torment she experienced in the past. This is in part due to the fact that having knowledge of and seeing violence in a detached way is very different from experiencing it in person, and she had never "lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. [She] was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from [her]" …show more content…

The novel shows how even those born in the modern era are not safe from a time when racism was the norm and where they must confront the consequences of a system that dehumanizes people of colour. It can be seen how race shapes not just individual experiences but also societal structures and how the consequences of its history can reverberate through generations. By examining these challenges, Kindred highlights the inescapable nature of inequality, speculating that actions within the past can have permanent effects, creating struggles for generations to come. This novel forces the recognition that, well, humankind is not inherently evil; they will participate in "monstrous things [that their] society [says are] legal and proper"

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From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall. I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped. I pulled my arm toward me, pulled hard.” With the killing of Rufus, Dana no longer had to be called back in time into the time of slavery.

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For Kindred, Octavia Butler took a different approach on comparing two different worlds. Instead of choosing a simple path to describe two different times, she mashes them together to face reality and show how one relationship could’ve been like the other if they had met in an earlier time. This book shows that you can be from two different times but still be the same just based off your race. Dana and Kevin are from the 1970’s where racism still exist but blacks are free. Rufus and Alice are from the 1820’s where slavery still very well exists and the trading of slaves is still going on.

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Landon Szabo Ari Finkelstien Language Arts Period 3 4/8/24. Whoever Controls the Past, Controls the Future: An Essay About Kindred Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, is a book of many talents. Those talents include the themes. Dana’s journey throughout the book takes her to the past, where she learns valuable themes. The themes of violence, choices and their relationship with power, and kinship, which can relate back to the experiences of African Americans in our history.

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Imagine living in a world where there is a constant fight for power; a place where people are controlling others’ every move, no matter how good or bad it may be. That was the unfortunate reality for slaves. The novel, Kindred explores the idea of power through a hierarchy on a plantation. Dana, a 26-year-old woman from the present, jumps to the past where she faces a hierarchy of power alongside the Weylin family. Throughout the book, Dana experiences the betrayal of trust, from a young boy, named Rufus.

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Analyzing Character Development: Dana Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, provides a unique look into slavery in the antebellum South through the eyes of Edana Franklin, a black woman living in the late 20th century, who is suddenly sent through time to the early 19th century where she is suddenly faced with the task of protecting her ancestor, Rufus, from many dangers in order to ensure her existence in the present. Dana begins her adventure with no knowledge of how or why she has been given this responsibility and, as a result, must adapt to her new and unfamiliar surroundings. As the novel progresses, the reader sees Dana’s internal battle with herself as she decides whether or not Rufus is worth saving, or if she should let Rufus die

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Their difference in race also causes a disruption. Specifically, on page 124, when Rufus tells Dana how he “begged her not to go with him” (124), dana realizes that he loves Alice but that “there was no shame in raping a Black woman, but there could be shame in loving one” (124). This presents the imbalance between a white man and Black woman in the 1800’s because if he were to publicly love Alice, it would be seen as though he is only looking for someone to control, he is looking for a person to have power over, because he will always have more power over Alice no matter what, in the fact that he is white and she is black, he can own land, she cannot, he can have a career, she

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Kindred and Get Out: A Critique on Modern Society and Its Racism “Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred” (Butler, 116-117). The history of slavery and racism in the United States is a complex and important one, having shaped contemporary society. Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Jordan Peele's film Get Out explore these issues through the study of the lasting effects of slavery and racism on modern society. Additionally, they offer a challenge to certain narratives and stereotypes concerning these issues, the works offer a commentary on the ongoing struggles for racial justice

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Is the novel Kindred relevant to teenagers today? The novel is not relevant to any teenager in today's society as the novel's main focus is time travel and slavery. The novel's plot is Dana a black woman who is celebrating her 26th birthday with her husband in her home in california living in the 1970’s who gets transported to the past to save a little boy from drowning who she soon finds out is her ancestor who she must protect in order to be born. Some might argue that Kindred is relatable to teenagers today because it's important for teenagers to learn about their ancestry and what life was like during slavery for example Dana mentions how Tom Weylin was a ordinary man that did bad things because his society said it was okay some could

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In Kindred, Dana’s narrative entirely revolves around the slaveholding American narrative of Rufus which illustrates the second fiddle notion of Dana’s identities. The fact that she can only time travel when white man, Rufus, mortally needs her demonstrates that her entire story regardless of time is dictated by the White Man (Butler 12). Furthermore regarding time fragmentation, the imagery of Dana’s body being in a constant state of scars, bruises, and general crisis in 1976 and 1819 while Rufus’ body and life continues in a progressive linear state depicts how the white historical narrative continues to strut along time whereas the black, female, American narrative continues to be an unhealed wound discarded alongside white-American-male chronology. This notion is expressed when Dana puts her bodily pain to the side in order to sexually usher love and welcoming to Kevin’s five year journey in Antebellum south (Butler 190). Essentially Dana’s body politics do not exist in a state of paradox because through Butler’s textual portrayal of embodiment, she was and still remains as an

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Situations are defined by choices. Small actions in one moment of time alter the future of what happens forever. In Kindred by Octavia Butler Dana, the main character, is a black women born in 1976, who time travels back to the early 1800’s in order to save her relative, Rufus, a white boy who is the son of the owner of the plantation. Along the way she also meets her other relative, Alice, a slave born free, but enslaved since she helped her husband run away. Alice is owned by Rufus, who is convinced that he is in love with her.

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Racist and sexist stereotypes are depicted in the short story, Kindred. Kindred, is about an interracial couple living in California during the 1970s. Dana and Kevin are happily married, when Dana suddenly time travels back to the antebellum south during the time of slavery. Dana is an educated black woman, in the 70s it is normal for a black woman to have higher roles in society, but it is not

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This analysis of agency would be useful for a person pushing for more freedom of expression or freedom of speech. All in all, Bast’s successfully supports his perspective of agency through his evaluation of Kindred, and the comparison of the human instinct of expression to Dana’s want to create change with her time traveling powers constructs a powerful parallel between the novel and Bast’s article. The novel Kindred, however, serves to create an important message about society on its own, as well. Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a science-fiction novel that depicts the life experiences of a young black woman named Dana, who is given the task of traveling back in time to the era of slavery to save her ancestors, but is unjustly oppressed and has most, if not all, of her rights stripped away from her simply due to her race and gender. As a result, the most prominent overarching theme of the novel is the inequality of power and social status given to people of varying gender and race, and the struggle that those people must go through to gain as much freedom and equality as possible.

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The novel "Kindred" raises the question of the limits of human morality, particularly in the face of a society that condones slavery and encourages hate crimes against black people. In the story, “Kindred” the reader experiences the harsh setting of a society with slavery from the perspective of a black woman named Dana who experiences and watches horrid actions being committed against her fellow kind. The author uses a wide, detailed variety of southern gothic elements such as violence, broken characters and decay to fully bring out the themes of Family & Love, the History of Slavery, and the Corrupt influence of power. The title, “Kindred” itself means Family, which is the main theme the author wants to convey with her realistic details

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In one of Octavia Butler’s most well known books, Dana a struggling black author is yanked back in time to the antebellum south multiple times to save the life of her white slave-owning ancestor Rufus Weylin. When literary critics examined this piece of science fiction, many were motivated to write papers on a myriad of subjects in the book’s less than 300 pages. Scholarship on Octavia Butler’s Kindred has evolved from primarily focusing on how the novel connects its readers to the past to addressing more modern concerns of how African American culture and people are represented and viewed, as well as third wave feminism. One of the earliest scholarly articles on Octavia Butler’s Kindred is Lisa Long discussing how unknowable history is for

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Many women in the book, such as Sarah has all of her children sold, and is acceptable with slavery. Some of the female’s children become objects used against them, as a way to control their mother. Overall kindred is an example by and about women of color. These stories demonstrate the complexities surrounding problem that affect women of color. Slavery, power, and motherhood are all themes from Kindred.

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