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Beyond containing qualities of the historical slave narrative, Octavia Butler's 1988 Kindred may also be deemed a contemporary science fiction novel, though the author herself claims that "Kindred is fantasy. . . . There is no science in Kindred" (Kenan 495).1 Butler's vision in the novel is certainly not utopic. Whatever its narrative context, Butler's novel looks to the antebellum slave narrative form as a background for exploring issues of literacy in opposition to the reality of possession, oppression, and violence. Content and form intersect in the novel as the veiling of temporal boundaries blurs the notion of slavery transcended. By zigzagging the time frame of the novel from past to present, Butler points to ways in which past and present become interchangeable. She also writes of plausible historical actions and relationships, "filling in" possible gaps that may be evident in classic slave narratives. Butler assumes a non-Western conceptualization of history-one in which history is cyclical, not linear-in order to demonstrate ways in which certain forms of race and gender oppression continue late into the twentieth century and beyond. She incorporates postmodern fiction literary techniques to critique the notion that historical and psychological slavery can be overcome.
Unlike other contemporary revisions of the traditional slave narrative-most famously, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved-Butler's neo-slave narrative, at least in part, takes place in the relative present. As such, it more clearly blurs history and the present (though the neo-slavery novel by convention imposes the past onto the present). The novel liberally borrows from very modern and postmodern ideas concerning time and continuity. Like John Earth's The Sot-Weed Factor or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Butler attempts a contemporary re-write of an historical or plausibly historical event. Thus, she reclaims control over text and ideas, significant postmodern concepts. This drive to contain and to define one's personal or communal history can be seen in many contemporary novels. Ultimately, Butler's novel remains part contemporary postmodern text, part historical slave narrative.
One might label Kindred a sort of inverse slave narrative. Born into freedom herself in 1950, its protagonist Dana becomes enslaved on her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976, the bicentennial year of US independence, and, as many actual slave rebels reported, she must...