170 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Women Writers Series in 1988 and the publication of a twenty-fifth anniversary
edition in 2004.
Kindred was initially rejected by several publishers who were unable to envi-
sion a science-fiction novel set in the antebellum South as opposed to one set on
a planet in the future. Engaging multiple audiences, including science-fiction
aficionados as well as those in the disciplines of women’s studies and African
American studies, Kindred ’s popularity is attributable in part to its accessibility
and its hybrid nature. Butler often bristled at “boring” questions about how to
define this novel. She consistently responded by saying that she was a “writer,”
suggesting that the important question is whether she tells a good story.
Kindred employs time travel to send narrator Edana “Dana” Franklin from
1976 to the nineteenth century to experience plantation life in Maryland.
There, Dana must make the difficult choice of saving the life of the slave
owner Rufus Weylin, who will one day father the children of her ancestor Alice
Greenwood. The resulting birth of Rufus and Alice’s daughter Hagar ensures
Dana’s existence in the present. Critics see Kindred as somewhat of a departure
from Butler’s typical futuristic narratives from Patternmaster (1975) to Clay’s
Ark (1984); in fact, it is her only novel, besides Wild Seed (1980), that is set in
the past.
Butler began working on Kindred while in college. It was a black classmate’s
critical attitude and disdain for his parents’ “humility” and acquiescence that
motivated her to tell this story. Kindred draws on this disconcerting attitude—one
that reveals the palpable disillusionment and the failure to assess the histori-
cal context that disconnects the younger generation from its predecessors—to
explore the meaning of lived history. Butler notes, too, that Kindred helped her “to
resolve [her own] feelings” toward the indignities her mother willingly suffered
in her position as a domestic worker: in a 2004 interview with Daniel Burton-
Rose she said, “What I wanted to teach in writing Kindred was that people who
did the work my mother did were not frightened or timid or cowards; they were
heroes.” Timothy Spaulding argues that Butler “use[s] the fantastic as a vehicle
for conflating the past and the present” in order to emphasize the lasting effect
of slavery on twentieth-century African American identity. Even as the past is
central to Dana’s mission, Butler insists that her work “is not about the past; it’s
about the present and the future” (Burton-Rose Interview).
Butler died on 24 February 2006 in Seattle. Her work is inherently interdisci-
plinary, her themes are universal, and it speaks to many of the existing underlying
implications of race.
Kindred has attracted a significant amount of critical attention. In addition
to the articles listed in RESOURCES, some two dozen studies are cited in the
MLA bibliography. Students interested in general approaches to her work might
consult Christopher N. Okonkwo’s A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbanje,
the Born-to-Die, in African American Literature (University of Tennessee Press,
2008) for a study of the uses of myth in African American literature and Ashraf
H. A. Rushdy’s Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary Afri-
can American Fiction (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), which discusses
Kindred with regard to slave-family relationships.