A contested freedom: the fragile future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Abstract

Most scholarship that addresses Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred focuses on its value as a forerunner of the neo-slave narrative in African-American literature, and thus the manner in which traces of the past affect the protagonist’s present in the novel. However, given Butler’s established fixation with the future, I contend that one may also read Kindred from a futurist perspective. I find that Butler’s vision of the future in this novel is pessimistic because the protagonist fails to resist the white, patriarchal authority perpetuated in patrilinear time in a definitive manner, so that the liberatory trajectory of the novel ultimately fails. Because of this, Butler’s pessimistic vision of the future is one in which racism and sexism may well continue to haunt African-American experience.