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Summary Of Kindred By Octavia Butler

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Time Travel intrigues our imagination; making it believe that we have the power to change history and alter the present moment we live to make life normative. In Octavia Butler's novel Kindred Dana is gifted the ability to time travel without any control how and when she does. She is transported from 1970’s California to 1800’s Maryland; the Old Line State which induces in the practice of slavery. Dana has to learn that she is presented dangers with altering the timeline and could potentially be erased from existence. The novel blurs the line between past and present, while illustrating that history shapes the way we interact thus shaping societal standards. Society standards which include the topic of interracial relationships between …show more content…

Dana ultimately discerns when she travels back and saves Rufus from the fire; she is sent back by a mysterious force that she must save her own bloodline. Dana realizes she travels back to a dangerous time period. The 1800’s which slavery has been not been abolished by hasn’t been into fully effective by the time. Dana forces herself to help Rufus, even though Rufus’s family owns slaves and is cruel to them: “What kind of man was he going to grow up into?”(Butler 25) Dan is poised with a dilemma to let Rufus and his family cruel perspective psychologically torture her as she is placed back in time. Dana must burn the maps and books of information available, so if that Rufus gets handed that information; surely something horrible would happen. Dana see herself as a protector of history with the acquisition that she must also defend history to preserve man’s good nature.“He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and …show more content…

Topic address in the book concerning the time period of 1800’s and 1970’s would be interracial relationships.In 1967, The Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, “struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in 16 states”(Pew Center). Interracial marriage are now seen as societal norms. This decision came after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The book's highlights a change throughout historical context after major changes in ideologies. The 1800’s saw approachment to the abolition movement of the 13th and 14th amendments. A change in the government necessarily doesn't mean a change in interaction. Interactions betweens slaves and slave master existed before the abolition. To please their master, they obeyed We can see through examples of Weylin's with Dana, Alice and the other slaves. Rufus ask Dana to write letters for him(Buter 226) The similarities of both time period come after a major ideological changed forced by the government. The society in both time periods try to adjust to what was seen as wrong to become

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Dana's Life Exposed In Kindred By Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is a science fiction time travel novel, but Kindred is not like other science fiction novels. The book is told in first person by the main character Dana, a modern day black woman as she travels between her time 1976, and the antebellum South. When Dana transports to the antebellum South she is forced to endure slavery and the violence and abuse that comes along with it. As we read further into the book we see Dana’s life and relationships change because of the time travel. Dana is first introduced to us a Dana's last visit to the past brings us full circle; when she must murder Rufus to fend off his attempt to rape her, he grasps her arm as she is sent forward in time, anchoring her arm in the past.

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Michelle Alexander in the first chapter, reviews the history of racial social control in the United States. She describes the different forms and patterns of the racial caste system. The author maintains that the racial prejudice and hierarchy has been sustained as a result of the insecurities of the lower-class whites. Her main point was that "racial segregation would soon evolve into a new caste system" (p. 40). Alexander explains that even though slavery ended after the Civil War, it left a big impact on the American community.

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Kindred By Octavia E. Butler: Character Analysis

1583 Words | 7 Pages

“It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery,”--or so Rufus’s neighbors claim as they observe his liability of allowing slaves to have even the slightest form of education. In the novel, Kindred, composed by Octavia E. Butler, Dana strives to maintain agency, or power over situations and personal encounters, as she navigates the Antebellum South after being miraculously teleported through time. While exploring this oppressive society, Dana turns to using knowledge from 1976, the time era she came from, in order to gain agency over others who automatically have more power than her, such as Rufus, the son of a plantation owner she is tasked with helping.

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Analysis Of Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

913 Words | 4 Pages

But it came— like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin …” (Butler 107). Dana also had formed different relationships with different slaves because they either had house jobs instead of field jobs and some slaves did not for her personality and some didn’t. For most slaves in the 1800’s, slaves and their masters had very little to no relationship and the masters would only tell them what to do or face their consequences. For all of these reasons, the book could categorize into the genre of historical

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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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Southern Race Relations In The 1900's

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My paper is about southern race relations in the mid 1900s. People in the 1900s treated African-Americans with much less respect then they did to white people. Like in the book, which takes place in the mid 1900s, it shows how people did treat blacks; they had them in different areas of town, they had to go to different churches and school, and they also just disrespected blacks. Like in the book with Atticus, there was people who didn’t like the way people were treating blacks, and tried to change it (Martin Luther King Jr.). In 1619, People brought African-American people to the Americas, sold them as slaves, and so began race problems.

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Kindred By Octavia Butler: Literary Analysis

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A normality in the literary world is that texts deeply nestled in the crosshairs of biopolitics, gender, nationalism, and other identity particularities often fall victim to one sided and dogmatic cultural critiques. Critic after critic find difficulty regarding how to analyze and essentially read a novel where intersectionality is intrinsic to its framework such as Kindred, because it does not fit the fairly common singular literary theory mold. This notion is articulated and defended in “"Some Matching Strangeness": Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's "Kindred"” where Robertson explores Butler’s usage of Dana’s body to confront universal truths and to cement the idea that Dana is in a historical paradox due

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Trauma In Octavia Butler's Kindred

1674 Words | 7 Pages

As an African America, Dana is forced into the life of a slave, suffering through various hardships and numerous close encounters with death. All of these experiences have a significant effect on Dana’s mental stability, as she becomes more and more distant and distressed. However, her fellow characters are unable to fully realize Dana’s state of

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The Role Of Interracial Relations In The Antebellum South

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Morgan Roney Interracial Relations in the Antebellum South Interracial sexual relations under slavery were a major factor of the early national and antebellum South. In Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861, by Joshua D. Rothman, many relationships are shared to illustrate what went on during those times. Relationships that were most talked about included those between slave masters and their slaves. Sexual relations raised many issues including: race, slavery, and violence. They also brought about various responses from people around.

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Embodied Agency In Octavia Butler's Kindred

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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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Imagine waking up in complete darkness and not knowing who or where you are. That was the problem that Shori, the main character in “Fledgling”, faced at the beginning of the novel. After figuring out she had become an Ina (similar to a vampire) and finding her father, Shori and her symbionts (co-dependent humans) move into a community with other Ina’s. Soon after she moves in, several Ina’s plan to kill Ina because she is genetically modified. Shori has human melanin, making her skin dark and allowing her to move around freely in the daylight.

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Kindred Theme Essay

1083 Words | 5 Pages

In any novel there is multiple parts that make up and define how the novel will go, such as if the character will be good. There is always a storyline to follow and from that storyline there are many different themes that give the novel character. In the novel Kindred by Octavian Butler there are multiple themes laced into the text that make the novel what it is. For example, throughout the story there is a huge underlying theme that involves Rufus Weylin, a main character of the novel and how the environment shapes him into the man he is at the end of the novel. Kindred starts off with Dana, a black woman, who by some mysterious means is sent back in time, to the days where her ancestors were alive and enslaved by Tom Weylin, a southern plantation

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In America’s Antebellum Period, the concept of slavery meant much more to a slave woman than hours of hard labor; to many, it also meant the continuous objectification of black women, both as property and subservient dependents of their masters. There is no better an example of this than in 12 Years A Slave’s Patsy, whose is enslaved through her forceful resignation to the role of an object, both to be used at her master’s lecherous whim and broken by a scorned mistress. An ever-present aspect of Patsy’s bondage is her inability to refuse her master’s lust, as she is his property.

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Dana and Rufus’s Relationship Ever wonder what it's like to have a changing relationship with a plantation owner's son back in the 1800’s? Dana Franklin is a younger African-American woman married to Kevin Franklin who is a middle-aged man. Dana travels from California in 1976 back to the early 1800’s whenever Rufus is in trouble. Rufus is a plantation owner son and is also the father of Dana’s ancestor. Dana’s travels are random; she gets lightheaded and dizzy when she is about to travel.

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