Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Kindred (Spring)/sandbox team 5

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sandbox (draft page) Team 5: Dana is All Right[edit]

Enter your sections below to see how it would look as a Wikipedia page >>>>

Genre[edit]

Publishers and academics have had a hard time categorizing Kindred. In an interview with Randall Kenan, Butler stated that she considered Kindred “literally” as “fantasy.”[1] According to Pamela Bedore, Butler's novel is difficult to classify because it includes both elements of the slave narrative and science fiction.[2] Frances Smith Foster insists Kindred does not have one genre and is in fact a blend of “realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, neo-slave narrative, and initiation novel.”[3] Sherryl Vint describes the narrative as a fusion of the fantastical and the real, resulting in a book that is "partly historical novel, partly slave narrative, and partly the story of how a twentieth century black woman comes to terms with slavery as her own and her nation's past."[4]

Critics who emphasize Kindred’s exploration of the grim realities of antebellum slavery tend to classify it mainly as a neo-slave narrative. Jane Donawerth traces Butler's novel to the recovery of slave narratives during the 1960s, a form then adapted by female science fiction writers to their own fantastical worlds[5]. Robert Crossley identifies Kindred as "a distinctive contribution to the genre of neo-slave narrative" and places it along Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage.[6] Sandra Y. Govan calls the novel "a significant departure" from the science fiction narrative not only because it is connected to "anthropology and history via the historical novel," but also because it links "directly to the black American slave experiences via the neo-slave narrative."[7] Noting that Dana begins the story as a free black woman who becomes enslaved, Marc Steinberg labels Kindred an "inverse slave narrative."[8]

Still, other scholars insist that Butler’s background in science fiction is key to our understanding of what type of narrative Kindred is. Dana’s time traveling, in particular, has caused critics to place Kindred along science fiction narratives that question "the nature of historical reality,” such as Kurt Vonnegut's "time-slip" novel Slaughterhouse Five[9] and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, or that warn against "negotiat[ing] the past through a single frame of reference," as in William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum."[10] In her article “A Grim Fantasy,” Lisa Yaszek argues that Butler adapts two tropes of science fiction--time-travel and the encounter with the alien Other-- to “re-present African-American women’s histories.”[11] Raffaella Baccolini further identifies Dana's time traveling as a modification of the "grandfather paradox" and notices Butler's use of another typical science fiction element: the narrative's lack of correlation between time passing in the past and time passing in the present.[12] The North Remembers16 (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Ronin1123 (talk) 18:04, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Adoreher (talk) 18:48, 19 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Trauma and its connection to historical memory (or historical amnesia)[edit]

Kindred reveals the repressed trauma slavery caused in America’s collective memory of history. In an interview on 1985, Butler suggested that this trauma partly comes from attempts to forget America's dark past: "I think most people don’t know or don’t realize that at least 10 million blacks were killed just on the way to this country, just during the middle passage....They don’t really want to hear it partly because it makes whites feel guilty."[13] In a later interview with Randall Kenan, Butler explained how debilitating this trauma has been for Americans, especially for African Americans, as symbolized by the loss of her protagonist’s left arm: "I couldn’t really let [Dana] come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and [losing her arm], I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole."[14]

Many academics have extended Dana’s loss as a metaphor for the “lasting damage of slavery on the African American psyche” [15] to include other meanings: Pamela Bedore, for example, reads it as the loss of Dana's naïvete regarding the supposed progress of racial relations in the present.[16] For Ashraf Rushdy, Dana’s missing arm is the price she must pay for her attempt to change history.[17] Robert Crossley quotes Ruth Salvaggio as inferring that the amputation on Dana’s left arm is a distinct “birthmark” that represents a part of a “disfigured heritage.”[18] Scholars have also noted the importance of Kevin’s forehead scar, with Diana R. Paulin arguing that it symbolizes Kevin's changing understanding of racial realities, which constitute “a painful and intellectual experience.”[19] The North Remembers16 (talk) 18:01, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Ronin1123 (talk) 18:04, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Adoreher (talk) 18:48, 19 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Butler, Octavia E. "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler." Randall Kenan. Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 495. JSTOR. Web. 26 April 2014.
  2. ^ Bedore, Pamela. "Kindred." Masterplots, 4th Edition (2010): 4. MagillOnLiterature Plus. Web. 9 Feb. 2014.
  3. ^ Foster, Frances S. “Kindred.“ The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. ISBN 019513883X (10) ISBN 978-0195138832 (13)
  4. ^ Vint, Sherryl. "'Only by Experience': Embodiment and the Limitations of Realism in Neo-Slave Narratives." Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (Jul. 2007): 243. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
  5. ^ Donawerth, Jane. "Feminisms: Recovering Women's History." The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. 219. Print. ISBN 041545378X (10) ISBN 978-0415453783 (13)
  6. ^ Crossley, Robert. "Critical Essay." In Kindred, by Octavia Butler. Boston: Beacon, 2004. 265. Print. ISBN 0807083690 (10) ISBN 978-0807083697 (13)
  7. ^ Govan, Sandra Y. "Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel." MELUS 13.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1986): 79. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
  8. ^ Steinberg, Marc. "Inverting History in Octavia Butler's Postmodern Slave Narrative." African American Review 38.3 (2004): 467. JSTOR. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
  9. ^ Booker, Keith, and Anne-Marie Thomas. “The Time-Travel Narrative.” The Science Fiction Handbook. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.16. Print. ISBN 1405162066 (10) ISBN 978-1405162067 (13)
  10. ^ Yaszek, Lisa. "Cultural History." The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. 197. Print. ISBN 0415453798 (10) ISBN 978-0415453790 (13)
  11. ^ Yaszek, Lisa. "'A Grim Fantasy': Remaking American History in Octavia Butler's Kindred." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.4 (Summer 2003): 1053-1066. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
  12. ^ Baccolini, Raffaella. “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekind, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler." Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 27. Print. ISBN 084769125X (10) ISBN 978-0847691258 (13)
  13. ^ Butler, Octavia. “Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler: Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre.” Frances M. Beal. Black Scholar (Mar/Apr. 1986): 17. Print.
  14. ^ Butler, Octavia E. "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler." Randall Kenan. Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 498. JSTOR. Web. 26 April 2014.
  15. ^ McEntee, Grace. “Kindred.” African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color. Volume 2: K-Z. Ed. Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu. Westport,CT: Greenwood, 2006. 524. Print. ISBN 0313331960 (10) ISBN 978-0313331961 (13)
  16. ^ Bedore, Pamela. "Kindred." Masterplots, 4th Edition (2010): 5. MagillOnLiterature Plus. Web. 9 Feb. 2014.
  17. ^ Rushdy, Ashraf. "Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler's Kindred." College English. 55.2 (Feb. 1993): 143. JSTOR. 23 October 2012.
  18. ^ Crossley, Robert. "Critical Essay." In Kindred, by Octavia Butler. Boston: Beacon, 2004. 267. Print. ISBN 0807083690 (10) ISBN 978-0807083697 (13)
  19. ^ Paulin, Diana R. "De-Essentializing Interracial Representations: Black and White Border-Crossings in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever and Octavia Butler's Kindred." Cultural Critique 36 (Spring 1997): 187. JSTOR. 11 Feb. 2014.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Education_program_archive/CUNY,_LaGuardia_Community_College/The_Research_Paper:_Kindred_(Spring)/sandbox_team_5&oldid=1029526169"