Butler’s concerns focus on race identity and its implications for black women, their positions in the past, and the relevance of race for the present society as a whole.
Kindred reveals Butler’s commentary on history and its relationship to the present, particularly in terms of race, class, and gender. As an ironic counterpoint to the celebratory commemoration of United States freed, Butler writes a time-travel novel of African American enslavement in the nineteenth century.
The story is set in 1976-the bicentennial year of the United States-a symbol of America’s independence from Britain. Hence, in the novel, Butler captures history and its meaning in the context of black women’s identity and place. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), history is treated differently by investigating black women’s times past and future through the character Dana Franklin. According to White, history can also provide the dreams for prosperous futures. In the above passage from Ar’n’t I a Woman, Deborah Gray White explains the effects of history on a culture and what it provides in terms of those person’s uniqueness.
0 kommentar(er)
