Kindred, pp. 240-264

Kindred, pp. 240-264

Respond to the following prompt-

There’s a story (and it’s probably just a story) that upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Abraham Lincoln remarked, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” This suggests that this one novel pushed the Union into a war. During the Harlem Renaissance, black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois criticized people like Carl Van Vechten and Claude McKay for sensationalizing black life and culture in order to succeed commercially by enflaming passions at the expense of real dialogue.

Can the same criticism be leveled at Kindred? Unlike the original slave narratives of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Ann Jacobs, Butler’s book is a fictionalized account based on historical records, and complicating things further, it utilizes the tropes of science fiction in order to tell its story.

Is it escapist literature that sensationalizes slavery? Or does it potentially give its readers a better understanding of American slavery and its historical legacy? Explain.

•What does the ending of the novel mean? Why does it end that way?

book link: http://librebood.com/libre/Octavia%20Butler/Kindred%20(432)/Kindred%20-%20Octavia%20Butler.pdf