Inter-marginality as a Play Space: A Reading of Octavia Butler Kindred

Abstract

The trope of time travel in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) has elicited various readings and sparked debate as to whether the novel is to be associated with science fiction. Modeled on 19^th century slave narratives, Kindred revisits American slavery through its Afro-American protagonist Dana Franklin’s arcane sporadic trips back to the antebellum era. Building on cultural critic bell hooks’ view of the margin as “a space of radical openness”, this paper investigates the protagonist’s states of marginality in 1967 California where she is, at least legally, free and in antebellum Maryland where she is a slave or forced to assume the identity of a slave. The paper also combines insight from philosophical hermeneutics and reception theory to read the protagonist’s sporadic trips between the present and the past as a vacillatory play movement between two states of marginality, which transcends the margin into a space of resistance fit for protean identity construction. Kindred is thus approached as a narrative that stages inter-marginality as a site for play where historical memory, subjectivity and resistance are continuously negotiated.

Keywords: time travel, marginality, slavery, play, space, understanding, history