Given the recent rise in popularity of feminist dystopias, and the resurgence of interest in classics such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it seems appropriate to return to works such as Kindred that trouble both generic boundaries and readerly frames. Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel draws on the dystopic tradition to complicate and deepen her neo-slave narrative’s call to action, demonstrating how Black women’s bodies have always been tools in service of white supremacist futures. Kindred speaks explicitly to a Black feminist project of re-cognising the past, and simultaneously reclaims the dystopia as a space wherein past injustices might be actively apprehended – even remedied. This paper draws on Lee Edelman’s description of reproductive futurity not only to re-situate Kindred as a central text in the feminist dystopic tradition, but also to illuminate Butler’s attentiveness to the re-inscriptions of the slave past in the present moment. Ultimately, I argue for a new reading of the novel in which Butler’s dystopic vision might continue to inflect our orientations towards history and our own futurity, almost sixty years after its first publication.
Amy Bouwer (Wed,) studied this question.