Octavia Butler’s Kindred: The Cultural Context of Production
Through Butler’s Kindred, numerous tensions are raised around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality and inclusion exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that disability informs Dana’s experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contempo...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Casa Cărții de Știință
2021-12-01
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| Series: | Cultural Intertexts |
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| Online Access: | https://b00e8ea91c.clvaw-cdnwnd.com/4fb470e8cbb34a32a0dc1701f8d7322d/200000411-9719497196/157-169%20Kosma.pdf |
| Summary: | Through Butler’s Kindred, numerous tensions are raised around the notions of
accessibility, disability, equality and inclusion exposing the crisis of black futures. My
analysis focuses on the way that disability informs Dana’s experiences in the context
of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism and her
positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana’s subjectivity as
an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The
materiality of disability has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American
slave system. Through rendering disability both figuratively and materially, I establish
a connection between the past, the present and the future. The different figurations of
space and time exposed through Dana’s time travelling help conceptualize her
accessibility in different structures. Previous scholarship has been extensively focusing
on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth
century, however, there has been too little, if any criticism in relation to the active
construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I wish to
explore how spectacles of violence against black female bodies function in the wider
political imagery of the twenty-first century. The physical and psychological
displacement of Dana, as a black female body, exposes her traumatization and the
difficulties she faces in order to reclaim her subjectivity in a society burdened by a
history of violence and exploitation. Even though Kindred was written before the Black
Lives Matter movement emerged, it could be analysed in a way that asserts the
continuity of African-American trauma, the perpetuation of systematic racism in USA
and the crisis of blackness in the future. Systematic violence threatens black women’s
wholeness and renders their bodies at risk. |
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| ISSN: | 2393-0624 2393-1078 |