Kindred

As a literary subset of the science fiction genre, time travel stories have a rich history in both literature and pop culture. Kindred is in direct conversation with previous stories in its genre, most notably Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which sees an American travel back to Arthurian times and try to use his knowledge of modern technology, only to be stymied by medieval society. Dana’s journey in Kindred is similar, but by highlighting how unsafe time travel is for Black people (or any other historically oppressed people), Butler draws attention to the genre as one that is written by and for the white imagination. In using standard tropes of the genre—not being able to interfere for fear of creating a paradox, for example, or interacting with ancestors in an ironic way—Butler over and again emphasizes the way racism is built into the fabric of American history and the inescapable legacy that this racism has for people living in the present. Butler’s reappropriation of a science fiction conceit allows her to create a postmodern, Black version of a genre that has historically excluded Black narratives, and in doing so, she creates a scathing critique of the genre itself and the society that created it.