Afrofuturism

Octavia E. Butler

Kindred (1979)

Dr Katie Muth

Doubleday, 1979

Knopf, 1987

Middleton Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernst Smith, eds. The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974)

Beloved, according to Morrison, is a story about something no one wants to remember: ‘The characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember.’ What no one wants to remember, she thinks, is slavery, and whether or not this characterization is accurate, it succeeds in establishing remembering or forgetting as the relevant alternatives. It establishes, in other words, that although no white people or black people now living ever experienced it, slavery can and must be either remembered or forgotten.

Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, p. 135

[It] is a striking fact about Beloved that it presents itself as a ghost story, that its account of the past takes the form of an encounter with a ghost, a ghost who is, as Valerie Smith has said, ‘the story of the past embodied’. 

Michaels, p. 136

Taken together, these novels actually represent a range of genres that break from realism, including fantasy, science fiction, ghost stories, historiographic metafiction, and even vampire tales; the term speculative fiction offers a convenient shorthand for discussing these various kinds of novels as part of a distinct literary phenomenon. … Documentary realism was an essential component of antebellum fugitive slave narratives; relaying the unvarnished truth about slavery was crucial to the political goal of pressing the case for abolition.

Madhu Dubey, ‘Speculative Fictions of Slavery’, pp. 779–80. 

In refusing to comprehend slavery as an occurrence that has passed into the register of history, these novels dispute the idea that the Civil Rights movement marked the completion of a long struggle against racial inequality launched in the era of slavery.

Dubey, pp. 780–1. 

Continuing in the tradition of the slave narrative’s advocacy for the power of literacy to grant freedom and greater political awareness, not to mention self-awareness (as Fredrick Douglass’s Narrative does), Kindred draws attention to the absence of a (literary) history of slavery within contemporary literature, education, and politics circa the 1960s and ’70s, especially regarding black women. 

Philip Miletic, ‘Octavia E. Butler’s Response to Back Arts/ Black Power’, p. 261

Dana’s reading of historical texts is a form not of textual control but rather of a textual archaeology of literature that has been excluded from an institutional education system and from a black literature that sought to remove slavery from the literary consciousness. Rather than attempting to establish mastery over history (i.e., textual control), Dana is unearthing narratives of history she has not encountered and putting these narratives in constellation in order to illuminate (but never fully completely) her understanding and knowledge of the past (i.e., textual archaeology).

Miletic, p. 262

Dana’s unexplained time-traveling and her struggles to write her experiences is synonymous with researching, confronting, and writing the difficult history of slavery, especially of black women slaves, and the unexpected directions this research takes. Kindred does not present the failure of literacy to invoke action to be taken, but argues instead that writing and research is a necessary, productive, and involving struggle. This struggle pits itself politically against an ahistory and affectively creates a space for black women’s involvement in the production of black literary history.

Miletic, p. 262

I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject—even Gone With the Wind, or part of it. But its version of happy [ … ] in tender loving bondage was more than I could stand. 

Kindred, p. 126

‘You’re reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you’ll find a white man named J. D. B. De Bow [James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow, editor of De Bow’s Review, a Southern agricultural and eventually sucessionist magazine that advised, among other things on ‘the best practices for wringing profits from slaves’.] claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

Kindred, p. 153

And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn’t happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern Laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County, was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost the Eastern Shore plantation owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom. And farther down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more.

Kindred, p. 153–4

I had said I couldn’t do anything to change history. Yet, if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man—even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.

Kindred, p. 154

Science fiction allows history to be rewritten or ignored. Science fiction promises a future full of possibility, alternative lives and even revenge. … In science fiction we have a literary genre made to rail against the status quo. 

Walter Mosley, ‘Black to the Future’, n.p.

'That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

Kindred, p. 153

African-Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers readily come to mind). … Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’.

Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future', p. 180

The advantage of Science Fiction as a point of cultural departure is that it allows for a series of worst-case futures—of hells-on-Earth and being in them—which are woven into every kind of everyday present reality …. The central fact in Black Science Fiction—self-consciously so named or not—is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in PE’s phrase) Armageddon been in effect. Black SF writers—Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler—write about worlds after catastrophic disaster; about the modalities of identity without hope of resolution. 

Mark Sinker, ‘Loving the Alien in Advance of the Landing’, n.p.

I spoke to Kevin again.

            ‘You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer,’ I said. ‘I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids’ game, I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that.

Kindred, p. 107

I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. ‘The ease seemed so frightening,’ I said. ‘Now I see why.’

            ‘What?’

            ‘The ease. Us, the children . . . I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.’ 

Kindred, p. 108

I was working out of a casual labor agency—we regulars called it a slave market. Actually, it was just the opposite of slavery. The people who ran it couldn’t have cared less whether or not you showed up to do the work they offered. They always had more job hunters than jobs anyway. If you wanted them to think about using you, you went to their office around six in the morning, signed in, and sat down to wait. …

Kindred, p. 51

You sat and sat until the dispatcher either sent you out on a job or sent you home. Home meant no money. Put another potato in the oven. Or in desperation, sell some blood at one of the store fronts down the street from the agency. I had only done that once.

 

Getting sent out meant the minimum wage—minus Uncle Sam’s share—for as many hours as you were needed. You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory washed dishes, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise . . . you did whatever you were sent out to do. 

Kindred, p. 51–2

It was nearly always mindless work, and as far as most employers were concerned, it was done by mindless people. Nonpeople rented for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. It didn’t matter.

 

I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours. Finally, I got up and wrote. At one or two in the morning, I was fully awake, fully alive, and busy working on my novel.

Kindred, p. 52

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (New York: Doubleday: 1979)

Mark Dery, 'Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose', in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994) , 179–222

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845)

Madhu Dubey, ‘Speculative Fictions of Slavery’, American Literature 82.4 (2010): 779–805

Middleton Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernst Smith, eds. The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974)

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1861)

Philip Miletic, Octavia E. Butler's Response to Black Arts/Black Power Literature and Rhetoric in Kindred', African American Review 49.3 (Fall 2016): 261–275

Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987)

Walter Mosley, 'Culture Zone; Black to The Future', New York Times Magazine 1 November 1998, n.p.

Mark Sinker, 'Loving the Alien in Advance of the Landing', The Wire, February 1992, n.p.

References