Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Kindred (Spring)/sandbox team 1

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Characters

 * Edana (Dana) Franklin: A courageous, compassionate, and independent twenty-six-year-old African-American woman writer. She is the protagonist and the narrator of the story. She is married to a white writer named Kevin. She is forced to travel to a slave plantation in antebellum Maryland by her white slave-owning ancestor Rufus. On the plantation she must learn to make hard compromises to survive as a slave and to ensure her existence in her own time.


 * Rufus Weylin: The red-haired, white son of Tom Weylin, a Maryland plantation and slave owner. Dana first meets him as a young accident-prone boy torn between an indulgent mother and a strict father and sees him grow to replace Tom Weylin as slave master. He is needy as his mother and possessive and controlling like his father. His arrogant and pretentious behavior leads to him to rape and impregnate his longtime friend Alice (Dana’s great-great-great-grandmother), making him Dana’s ancestor. Rufus’ possessive behavior affects Dana’s and his relationship, making it a love/hate one.
 * Kevin Franklin: Dana’s husband, a white writer twelve years older than Dana. Kevin is a progressive person who is deeply in love with his wife. When he time travels with Dana to the past on one of her trips, he experiences firsthand the brutality of racism and its impact on non-whites and becomes an anti-slavery activist. Kevin eventually becomes resentful of Rufus and Dana’s relationship.


 * Tom Weylin: The merciless and brutal slave owner of an antebellum Maryland plantation. Tom’s cold, strict, and impatient personality makes him a hard master and father. When he perceives he has been disobeyed, he retaliates swiftly and violently, instilling fear in those subservient to him.


 * Alice Greenwood (later, Alice Jackson): A proud black woman, born free and then enslaved for helping her slave husband Isaac to run away. Alice is subsequently bought by Rufus, who forces her to become his concubine and bear four children by Rufus, though only two survive, Joe and Hagar. A tragic figure, she survives her fate by feeding off the hate she has for Rufus but hangs herself after Rufus tells her he has sold her children as punishment for trying to run away.


 * Sarah:The cook of the Weylin household and its unofficial manager, she works hard and makes the house slaves work hard, but also saves food for them and tries to protect them. Dana’s first impression of Sarah as a “mammy” changes when she learns Weylin has sold all of Sarah’s children except Carrie. Sarah’s outward compliance masks her anger, resentment, and suffering.


 * Margaret Weylin: The plantation owner's temperamental wife. She is over-indulgent and possessive of Rufus. Like her husband, she is abusive to the house slaves. She goes away for a long period of time when her infant twins die and returns much mellower due to an opium addiction.


 * Hagar Weylin: Rufus and Alice’s youngest daughter. Hagar is Dana’s direct blood line on her mother’s side. Without Hagar being born, Dana believes she would not exist.


 * Luke: A slave at the Weylin plantation and Nigel’s father. Luke works as Weylin’s overseer until Weylin sells him for not being sufficiently obedient.
 * Nigel: The son of Luke and a slave at the Weylin Plantation. As a small boy he is also Rufus’ playmate. Dana secretly teaches him to read and write. When older, he runs away unsuccessfully. Back on the plantation, he forms a family with Sarah’s daughter, Carrie.


 * Carrie: Sarah’s daughter and Nigel’s wife. Although Carrie is mute she is a source of strength for Dana by helping her come to terms with the hard compromises she must make for the sake of survival.


 * Liza: A slave woman jealous of Dana’s preferential treatment by the Weylins, she snitches on Dana when she runs away, causing her to get caught and whipped.

Jarika5230 (talk) 03:11, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Gpo20 (talk) 17:48, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Telissa18 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2014 (UTC)R 1994 (talk) 17:52, 19 May 2014 (UTC)teekay25 (talk) 19:56, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Tess: A slave woman at the Weylin plantation used as a sexual slave by Tom Weylin and later by Edwards, the white overseer.


 * Dr. X's feedback: Good job! Please bold the character names and you will be ready to transfer this today. :-)

Race as social construct
The construction of the concept of “race” and its connections to slavery are central themes in Butler’s novel. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint place Kindred as a key science fiction literary text of the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness period, noting that Butler uses the time travel trope to underscore the perpetuation of past racial discrimination into the present and, perhaps, the future of America. The lesson of Dana’s trips to the past, then, is that “we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction.”

The novel’s focus on how the system of slavery shapes its central characters dramatizes society’s power to construct raced identities. The reader witnesses the development of Rufus from a relatively decent boy allied to Dana to a “complete racist” who attempts to rape her as an adult. Similarly, Dana and Kevin’s prolonged stay in the past reframes their modern attitudes. Butler’s depiction of her principal character as an independent, self-possessed, educated African-American woman defies slavery’s racist and sexist objectification of blacks and women.

Kindred also challenges the fixity of “race” through the interracial relationships that form its emotional core. Dana’s kinship to Rufus disproves America’s erroneous concepts of racial purity as well as represents the “inseparability” of whites and blacks in America. The negative reactions of characters in the past and the present to Dana and Kevin’s integrated relationship highlight the continued bigotry of both the white and black communities. At the same time, the relationship of Dana and Kevin extends to concept of “community” from people related by ethnicity to people related by shared experience. In these new communities whites and blacks may acknowledge their common racist past and learn to live together.

The depiction of Dana’s white husband, Kevin, also serves to examine the concept of racial and gender privilege. In the present, Kevin seems unconscious of the benefits he derives from his skin pigmentation as well as of the way his actions serve to disenfranchise Dana; once he goes to the past, however, he must not just resist accepting slavery as the normal state of affairs, but dissociate himself from the unrestricted power white males enjoy as their privilege. His prolonged stay in the past transforms him from a naive white man oblivious about racial issues into an anti-slave activist fighting racial oppression.


 * Dr. X's feedback: Not a bad job finding most of the necessary sources. This section is ready for you to transfer to the live aritcle.

Older drafts
White supremacy and white privilege - “Centrality of Race”

1. The struggles of the civil rights during the 1960’s and 1970’s allowed for series of works on African American experience. The Black Power and Black Pride saw the development of a Black Art Movement that sought to recover and adapt the traditional African form.Kindred was part of this movement since no African American Sf novels were able to imagine moving beyond the need for urgent and radical change into differently constituted future. "Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) turns to the constraints that history continues to exercise on daily life, combining a time-travel narrative with a specifically African American literary form, the slave Narrative".

2.During an interview, Butler explained that her main reason for writing Kindred was to rectify the misunderstandings of the younger generation with respect to the racial roles their elders had to play to survive: “I was involved with some people who had gone off the deep end with the generation gap. They would say things like, ‘I would like to get rid of that older generation that betrayed us’. In an interview with Randall Kenan, Butler also admitted that as a young girl she had been ashamed of the invisible role her mother played in the white households she worked as a maid: “I spent a lot of my childhood being ashamed of what she did, and I think one of the reasons I wrote Kindred was to resolve my feelings, because after all, I ate because of what she did.”

3.The construction of race and how it helps originate racism are central to Butler’s novel. As Jane Davis explains, the narrative allows us to witness the development of two white characters: Rufus, who begins allied to Dana as a boy but grows to a “complete racist” who attempts to rape her, and Kevin, whose five-year stay in the past transforms him from a naive white man oblivious about racial issues into an anti-slave activist (2). The lesson of Dana’s trips to the past, argues Sherryl Vint, is that “we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction.” (248)

4.Throughout the Novel Kindred(1979) by Octavia Butler Black-White relationships was central to the novel, in Fosters article she states, “Though she loves her husband, Dana recognizes disturbing similarities between their rela­tionship and those of the antebellum period, while Kevin comes to regard Rufus as his rival for Dana's at­tention and affection”. Kevin and Dana were the only couple who were interracial and caused them to face awkward situations on the plantation. Another way Black-white relationships was displayed to be a central part of the novel is when Kubitschek states “His social conditioning works against him, of course, but his love for Dana makes him flexible”. This statement argues Kevin’s love for Dana is not affected by the negative things around them on the slave plantation. According to Paulin, “Their Black/White relationships are grounded in historical events that inform past and present Black/White relations in this country”. In the article by Mitchell she states butler gives an example of both color lines not only to understand slavery better but to explore collaborative solutions for contemporary race related problems.

“Dana takes an emotional interest in Rufus: From her second meeting with him, she wants to try to prevent him from accepting and practicing the racism that is a part both of his family and of the antebellum South.” “Kindred implies that we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction.”. “Dana and Kevin’s coworkers for instance, image their relationship only in terms of their appearances, their races.” “In the 1960s and 1970s, black writers, including Samuel Delany and Butler, joined their white feminist counterparts in publishing full-scale science fiction stories and novels. For these authors, science fiction provided more than just a way to re-present history; it allowed them to explore how such revisions might lead to new and more egalitarian futures as well.

5.Missy Dehn Kubitschek outlines how past and present reactions to Dana and Kevin’s relationship demonstrate the perpetuation of racism by implying that the integration of blacks and whites is wrong: “Tom Weylin’s salacious enjoyment of what he believes [to be] a perfectly usual master-slave liaison” is mirrored by Buz’s description of Dana and Kevin’s affair as “porn”; Alice’s hopes for a better future for her children is echoed by Dana’s aunt’s expectation that the union will produce light-skinned babies; the slaves’ resentment of Dana’s attachment to whites reflect Dana’s uncle’s disappointment at her betrayal of her race by marrying a white man (45).

6. Throughout Kendrid Kevin gets challenged on his “education” and how it affects his white identity. In the article by Rushdy it says “Kevin’s return to the past, then, offers him some enlightenment about the extremity of a patriarchal form of thinking in which he is still mildly engaged”. Another quote says “Of course there are limits to Kevins understanding of Dana’s ancestral past…” (150). In the article by Auaba R. Paulin it says “Neither Kevin nor Dana wants to keep getting thrown back to 1819, but Kevin chooses to return with Dana when she gets pulled back for the third time. The fact he has a choice emphasizes the gender and skin privilege”. Mcentee says “Eventually Kevin, Dana’s white husband, also become trapped in the past and readers get to see how different this experience is for a white male than for an African American female. “The whites around him accept slavery as a natural social order and fail to notice the cruelties that lurk beneath the calm, quotidian surface of this class system. Dana worries that Kevin could learn to do the same”.

7.Dana as a modern African-American woman challenges racist constructions simply because she feared by whites. “She is both attractive and intimidating because she challenges their racist reduction of black women to mere sex objects”.

8. “In the 1960s and 1970s, black writers, including Samuel Delany and Butler, joined their white feminist counterparts in publishing full-scale science fiction stories and novels. For these authors, science fiction provided more than just a way to re-present history; it allowed them to explore how such revisions might lead to new and more egalitarian futures as well.” (Yaszek, Lisa. "'A Grim Fantasy': Remaking American History in Octavia Butler's Kindred.")

9.Kindred moves away from communities of race to communities of experience showing “Accepting this heritage without allowing it to define her (killing Rufus rather than submitting to rape), reaccepting it in the new form personified by Kevin and her cousin but still insisting on her right to self-definition, Dan figures the African-American woman writer expanding the concept of community”.

R 1994 (talk) 05:31, 18 May 2014 (UTC) Jarika5230 (talk) 19:08, 19 May 2014 (UTC)teekay25 (talk) 19:31, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Gpo20 (talk) 19:47, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Telissa18 (talk) 20:06, 19 May 2014 (UTC)R 1994 (talk) 20:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)