(Kindred) Octavia Butler's Blurred Boundary Between Past and Present
Octavia Butler's Blurred Boundary Between Past and Present ***Disclaimer: There will be spoilers*** Octavia Butler's Kindred uses time travel to revisit the forgotten history of slavery in the American South, highlighting the institution’s forceful environment and induced hierarchy. Dana, a black novelist, is forcibly summoned into the slavery-driven antebellum south of 1815, her abnormal connection with Rufus Weylin bridging their two seemingly separate realities derived from the same historical source. As a modern figure, Dana’s presence in the past and her minuscule yet critical effects on Rufus and the Weylin plantation symbolize Butler's apparent collapse of the sequential flow of time (the present existing and affecting the past). However, along with Rufus's continuous life in the past, Dana’s existence and return to the present with permanent physical injuries, emotional trauma, and 1815 environmental acclimation from the antebellum...