Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Kindred (Spring)/sandbox team 2

Sandbox (draft page) Team 2: Power of the Females

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Reception

Kindred is Butler’s bestseller, with Beacon Press advertising it as “the classic novel that has sold more than 450,000 copies.”

Among Butler’s peers, the novel has been well received. Speculative writer Harlan Ellison has praised Kindred as “that rare magical artifact… the novel one returns it to again and again” while writer Walter Mosley placed the novel to be “everything the literature of science fiction can be.”

Book reviewers have been similarly enthusiastic. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner writer Sam Frank described the novel as “[a] shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now.” Reviewer Sherley Anne Williams from Ms. defined the novel to be “a startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of american slavery. Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer John Marshall claimed that Kindred is “the perfect introduction to Butler’s work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction.” The Austin Chronicle writer Barbara Strickland declared Kindred to be “a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction.”

Kindred has been a consistent text choice for high school and college courses throughout the years. Linell Smith of The Baltimore Sun describes it as “a celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture.” Speaking at the occasion of the reissue of Kindred for its 25th Anniversary by Beacon Press, African-American literature professor Roland L. Williams conjectured that the novel has remained popular over the years because of its crossover appeal, which “continues to find a variety of audiences--fantasy, literary and historical” and because “it is an exceedingly well-written and compelling story… that asks you to look back in time and at the present simultaneously.”

Kindred is often chosen as a common reading by communities and organizations. In 2003, the town Rochester, NY selected Kindred as the novel to be read during the third annual event of “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book.” Approximately 40,000 to 50,000 people participated by reading Kindred and joining panel discussions, lectures, film viewings, visual arts exhibitions, poetry readings and other events from February 2003 till March 2003. The town discussed the book in local groups and from March 4-7 met Octavia Butler during her appearances at colleges, community centers, libraries, and bookstores. In the spring of 2012, Kindred was chosen as one of thirty books to be given away as part of World Book Night, a worldwide event that aims to spread the love for books and reading by giving away hundreds of thousand of free paperbacks in one night.

Mel26 (talk) 17:42, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Primadonnagirl123 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Goldilocks14 (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2014 (UTC)SNSmith27 (talk) 18:01, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Strong Female Protagonist

In her article “Feminisms,” Jane Donawerth describes Kindred as a product of more than two decades of recovery of women’s history and literature that began in the 1970’s. The republication of a significant number of slave narratives, as well as the work of Angela Davis, which highlighted the heroic resistance of the black female slave, introduced science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and Suzy McKee Charnas to a literary form that redefined the heroism of the protagonist as endurance, survival, and escape. As Lisa Yaszek points further, many of these African-American woman’s neo-slave narratives, including Kindred, discard the lone male hero in favor of a female hero immersed in family and community (1056-1057). Robert Crossley sees Butler's novel as an extension of the slave woman’s memoir’s exemplified by texts such as Harriet Ann Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, especially in its portrayal of the compromises the heroine must make, the endurance she must have, and her ultimate resistance to victimization.

Originally, Butler intended for the protagonist of Kindred to be a man, but as she explained in her interview, she could not do so because a man would immediately be "perceived as dangerous": "[s]o many things that he did would have been likely to get him killed. He wouldn't even have time to learn the rules...of submission.” She then realized that sexism could work in favor of a female protagonist, "who might be equally dangerous" but "would not be perceived so."

Most scholars see Dana as an example of a strong female protagonist. Angelyn Mitchell describes Dana as a black woman “strengthened by her racial pride, her personal responsibility, her free will, and her self-determination." Identifying Dana as one of many Butler’s strong female black heroes, Grace McEntee explains how Dana attempts to transform Rufus into a caring individual despite her struggles with a white patriarchy. These struggles, Missy Dehn Kubitschek explains, are clearly represented by Dana’s resistance to white male control of a crucial aspect of her identity--her writing--both in the past and in the present. Sherryl Vint argues that, by refusing Dana to be reduced to a raped body, Butler would seem to be aligning her protagonist with “the sentimental heroines who would rather die than submit to rape” and thus “allows Dana to avoid a crucial aspect of the reality of female enslavement.” However, by risking death by killing Rufus, Dana becomes a permanent surviving record of the mutilation of her black ancestors, both through her armless body and by becoming “the body who writes Kindred.” In contrast to these views, Beverly Friend believes Dana represents the helplessness of modern woman and that Kindred demonstrates that women have been and continue to be victims in a world run by men.

Mel26 (talk) 17:43, 19 May 2014 (UTC)Primadonnagirl123 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Goldilocks14 (talk) 18:03, 19 May 2014 (UTC)SNSmith27 (talk) 18:05, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Female Quest for Emancipation

Some scholars consider Kindred as part of Butler's larger project to empower black women. Robert Crossley sees Butler' science fictional narratives as generating a "black feminist aesthetic" that speaks not only to the sociopolitical "truths" of the African-American experience, but specifically to the female experience, as Butler focuses on "women who lack power and suffer abuse but are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary." Given that Butler makes Dana go from liberty to bondage and back to liberty beginning on the day of her birthday, Angelyn Mitchell further views Kindred as a revision of the “female emancipatory narrative” exemplified by Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, with Butler's story engaging in themes such as female sexuality, individualism, community, motherhood, and, most importantly, freedom in order to illustrate the types of female agency that are capable of resisting enslavement. Similarly, Missy Dehn Kubistchek reads Butler's novel as “African-American woman’s quest for understanding history and self” which ends with Dana extending the concept of “kindred” to include both her black and white her heritage as well as her white husband while “insisting on her right to self definition."

Mel26 (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Goldilocks14 (talk) 18:03, 19 May 2014 (UTC) Primadonnagirl123 (talk) 18:06, 19 May 2014 (UTC) SNSmith27 (talk) 18:07, 19 May 2014 (UTC)