American history often suffers from a chronic case of “forgetting” or misremembering. Drawing power from the sf trope of time travel and from Darko Suvin’s concept of cognitive estrangement, Octavia Butler’s neo-slave novel, Kindred, uses the science fiction genre to explore and revise the complex racial fabric of American history and identity. Kindred’s protagonist, Dana, is an African American woman living in California in 1976, who is repeatedly pulled back through time and space to her white ancestor’s slave plantation in the antebellum South. While trapped in the past, Dana sustains intense physical and mental abuse, scrambling her sense of what is real, and what is fiction or false memory. Butler’s novel serves as a written testament to Dana’s struggle to rectify her “past” and her “present” realities as both African American slave and citizen. Using a lens of trauma studies literary analysis, and exploring the function of science fiction as a genre well-suited to house historical trauma, I investigate the triangulated relationship between race, gender and pain as experienced by Dana in Kindred. Equal parts testimony, resistance and historical revision, I argue that Dana’s pain as an individual becomes metonymical to the African American community’s ongoing experience with the aftershock of slavery. Bliss Cua Lim suggests that “we must expand our conception of the individual experience of suffering in order to acknowledge the felt injury of a community” (66). Through the medium of science fiction, Butler’s novel speaks to the ongoing wound of racial inequity as it seeks to fill gaps in both factual record and cultural memory. Taking up public space and challenging the dominant historical narrative, Kindred performs the crucial tasks of resisting erasure of historical truth while working toward a future with the possibility of enhanced social abreaction.
About the presenterNicole Lyn Lawrence
Nicole Lyn Lawrence is a professor at Utica University. Her teaching and research include British literature, queer theory, and gender & sexuality studies, and she has written about New Women writers and eugenics, Virginia Woolf, and the HBO series Gentleman Jack. She harbors an affinity for all things strange, sci-fi, and fantastical and is currently watching Universal Studios monster movies and writing about queer heterosexuality in Frankenstein and Dracula.