The Competing Demands of Community Survival and Self-Preservation in Octavia Butler's Kindred

The history of colonization and enslavement of Africans in the American experience forced Black women in the Diaspora to wrestle with finding ways to balance the competing demands of self-preservation versus community survival.

In speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler's Kindred, the protagonist, Dana Franklin [Edana], demonstrates how these two competing demands precipitate inner turmoil, and tensions between personal integrity and group allegiance as well as the threat of death. Butler positions the competing demands of self-preservation and personal integrity versus community survival and kinship ties in an unsettling mix illuminated by uncontrollable time travel, enslavement and interracial partnership. As such, Butler places 19th" and 20th-century values side by side: subjugation of women and feminism, rape versus the right to say no, submission versus self-defense, separatism versus integration.

A SELECTIVE LITERARY REVIEW

Literary scholars note that Kindred is one of the most widely read texts among feminists, African American women and sci-fi aficionados, not only because it illuminates relationships between the powerful and the powerless, but also because, according to Lisa Yaszek, it "is increasingly recognized as participating in African- American traditions of historical fiction" (1053). Yaszek also asserts that "In particular, scholars identify Kindred as an important precursor to the neo-slave narratives created by authors such as Toni Morrison and Sherley Anne Williams in the 1980s and 1990s" (1053).

In her discussion of Kindred, Yaszek notes the importance of historical memory in light of commercial culture that fails to provide holistic and accurate contexts for images and attitudes reserved for marginalized people. In its presentation of a contextualized African American history, Butler's Kindred counters commercial culture. Butler's accurate descriptions of enslavement, the life conditions of the enslaved and the harsh psychological dilemmas faced in daily slave life, re-present Black history for contemporary consumption. As such, Yaszek contends, "Butler participates in Afro-feminist projects to interrogate the relationship between historical memory and commercial culture by appropriating and adapting the commercial form of science fiction itself (1054). Commercial culture images are vested in normative depictions of blacks as objects of history, rather than as subjects, who have agency in the pursuit of changed social conditions and structures. Yaszek affirms that Butler's Kindred is part of the continuum of an African American literary tradition that gives voice not...