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Octavia Butler Kindred Analysis

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In one of Octavia Butler’s most well known books, Dana a struggling black author is yanked back in time to the antebellum south multiple times to save the life of her white slave-owning ancestor Rufus Weylin. When literary critics examined this piece of science fiction, many were motivated to write papers on a myriad of subjects in the book’s less than 300 pages. Scholarship on Octavia Butler’s Kindred has evolved from primarily focusing on how the novel connects its readers to the past to addressing more modern concerns of how African American culture and people are represented and viewed, as well as third wave feminism. One of the earliest scholarly articles on Octavia Butler’s Kindred is Lisa Long discussing how unknowable history is for …show more content…

Like Long, Donadey notes Butler’s concentration on history’s resistance to perfect re-experience. Heavily referring to Ashraf Rushdy’s essay on Kindred, when forming her line of questioning, Donadey, for a moment, appears to neglect assembling her own viewpoint in surmising Rushdy’s (Donadey 67). But Donadey shifts her gaze towards what Butler gains from choosing a first person narrator and contributes to the scholarship on Kindred strengthening her reasoning with inductive logic and examining the implications of the geographical regions the book is set in (Donadey 68, 71). Finally, she enhances her points even more through acknowledging the instances that appear to weaken her interpretation, and then regarding the same instances from another angle showing how they actually prove her point. She does this with her argument that the most scarring injury Dana endures is the loss of her arm, by accepting there are also numerous other instances of extreme physical trauma (Donadey

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