Octavia Butler's Kindred: a Study in Postmemory and Trauma

Abstract

This paper studies Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) as a collective postmemory and time-travel novel. The term "postmemory,” coined by Marianne Hirsch, describes the relationship the children of survivors of collective trauma have with their parents' memories. The term depicts a theoretical approach to analyze narrative representation of generational impact of traumatic memory in a diversity of cultural contexts and resulting from a variety of experiences. In spite of the temporal and spatial distance from slavery, contemporary African American writers engage slave history in their literary creations as the ancestral trauma in whose shadow all African Americans are raised. In the absence of reliable historical records of slavery and with the erosion of direct memory of that experience, sites of memory become important expressions of African American collective postmemory. Butler's Kindred is a compelling site for exploring and re-establishing the generational continuum and the possible meanings of the traumatic experience of slavery.