“What is the truth?:” On teaching paradoxes, race, family, and the self with Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article investigates the pedagogical power of teaching and learning alongside Octavia Butler's Kindred. I examine the stories of students enrolled in a special topics undergraduate honors seminar centered on personal discovery, race, and family using grounded theory and narrative textual analysis. Students' narratives reveal the ways Kindred and science fiction more generally offer opportunities for substantive culturally disruptive pedagogy (San Pedro, Citation2018) through sustained engagement with the mechanics of time travel, contending with impossible choices, and wrestling with contradictions and paradoxes. Learning from this course demonstrates the usefulness of Black feminist speculative pedagogy for building students' capacity for naming what is (Ohman, Citation2021) and by extension disrupting and confronting the historical and contemporary legacies of racism and heteropatriarchy.