Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Kindred (Spring)/sandbox team 5

Sandbox (draft page) Team 5: Dana is All Right
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Genre
Publishers and academics have had a hard time categorizing Kindred. In an interview with Randall Kenan, Butler stated that she considered Kindred “literally” as “fantasy.” According to Pamela Bedore, Butler's novel is difficult to classify because it includes both elements of the slave narrative and science fiction. Frances Smith Foster insists Kindred does not have one genre and is in fact a blend of “realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, neo-slave narrative, and initiation novel.” Sherryl Vint describes the narrative as a fusion of the fantastical and the real, resulting in a book that is "partly historical novel, partly slave narrative, and partly the story of how a twentieth century black woman comes to terms with slavery as her own and her nation's past."

Critics who emphasize Kindred’s exploration of the grim realities of antebellum slavery tend to classify it mainly as a neo-slave narrative. Jane Donawerth traces Butler's novel to the recovery of slave narratives during the 1960s, a form then adapted by female science fiction writers to their own fantastical worlds. Robert Crossley identifies Kindred as "a distinctive contribution to the genre of neo-slave narrative" and places it along Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage. Sandra Y. Govan calls the novel "a significant departure" from the science fiction narrative not only because it is connected to "anthropology and history via the historical novel," but also because it links "directly to the black American slave experiences via the neo-slave narrative." Noting that Dana begins the story as a free black woman who becomes enslaved, Marc Steinberg labels Kindred  an "inverse slave narrative."

Still, other scholars insist that Butler’s background in science fiction is key to our understanding of what type of narrative Kindred is. Dana’s time traveling, in particular, has caused critics to place Kindred along science fiction narratives that question "the nature of historical reality,” such as Kurt Vonnegut's "time-slip" novel Slaughterhouse Five and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, or that warn against "negotiat[ing] the past through a single frame of reference," as in William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum." In her article “A Grim Fantasy,” Lisa Yaszek argues that Butler adapts two tropes of science fiction--time-travel and the encounter with the alien Other-- to “re-present African-American women’s histories.” Raffaella Baccolini further identifies Dana's time traveling as a modification of the "grandfather paradox" and notices Butler's use of another typical science fiction element: the narrative's lack of correlation between time passing in the past and time passing in the present. The North Remembers16 (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Ronin1123 (talk) 18:04, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Adoreher (talk) 18:48, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Trauma and its connection to historical memory (or historical amnesia)
Kindred reveals the repressed trauma slavery caused in America’s collective memory of history. In an interview on 1985, Butler suggested that this trauma partly comes from attempts to forget America's dark past: "I think most people don’t know or don’t realize that at least 10 million blacks were killed just on the way to this country, just during the middle passage....They don’t really want to hear it partly because it makes whites feel guilty." In a later interview with Randall Kenan, Butler explained how debilitating this trauma has been for Americans, especially for African Americans, as symbolized by the loss of her protagonist’s left arm: "I couldn’t really let [Dana] come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and [losing her arm], I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole."

Many academics have extended Dana’s loss as a metaphor for the “lasting damage of slavery on the African American psyche” to include other meanings: Pamela Bedore, for example, reads it as the loss of Dana's naïvete regarding the supposed progress of racial relations in the present. For Ashraf Rushdy, Dana’s missing arm is the price she must pay for her attempt to change history. Robert Crossley quotes Ruth Salvaggio as inferring that the amputation on Dana’s left arm is a distinct “birthmark” that represents a part of a “disfigured heritage.” Scholars have also noted the importance of Kevin’s forehead scar, with Diana R. Paulin arguing that it symbolizes Kevin's changing understanding of racial realities, which constitute “a painful and intellectual experience.” The North Remembers16 (talk) 18:01, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Ronin1123 (talk) 18:04, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Adoreher (talk) 18:48, 19 May 2014 (UTC)