Key themes
- Slavery as intimate daily violence — not abstract history
- The time traveller as unwilling witness and participant
- What would you do to survive — and what does that reveal?
About this book
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.
Published in 1979, Kindred is Butler's most widely taught novel. She said she wrote it partly in response to younger Black people who dismissed their ancestors for enduring slavery, wanting to show what endurance actually required.
Discussion questions
- Dana keeps returning to the antebellum South involuntarily, to save the life of Rufus, the white ancestor she needs to survive. What does Butler achieve by making survival contingent on complicity with oppression?
- The novel refuses to explain the time travel mechanism. What does this refusal do — and how would the novel change if the science were explained?
- Kevin, Dana's white husband, also travels to the past. How does his different experience of slavery illuminate Dana's — and what does the novel say about the specific position of Black women?
- Dana returns to the present physically diminished each time. How does Butler use the body as the site of historical memory?
- Kindred is classified as science fiction, but it reads as historical fiction, horror and social critique. What does the genre-crossing achieve — and what would any single genre miss?
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