exorcizing the past: the slave narrative as historical fantasy
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abstract Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th-century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19thcentury Maryland and the other in 20th-century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time-periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America’s bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler’s fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler’s fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.
keywords African American history; American bicentennial; Black femininity; commemoration; fantasy; kindred; memory; narratives of identity; slave narratives; slavery; stereotypes
feminist review 85 2007 c 2007 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/07 $30 www.feminist-review.com (83–96)
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The authenticating strategies employed by the editors and publishers of many early 19th-century slave narratives attest to the then contentious status of the veracity of these texts. Typically featuring a white-authored preface and letters confirming the identity and experiences of the narrator, the ex-slave’s narrative is guaranteed by an authority acceptable to white, patriarchal America. As Robert Stepto (1991: 7) suggests, in his discussion of Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, this authentication not only mediated white America’s credulity but also ensured that the narratives avoided being labelled ‘fantasies’ by advocates of slavery. Stepto’s placement of the slave narrative as the ‘primary pre-generic myth’ (1991: xv) of African American letters signals the importance and influence that this form has been accorded by African American scholarship. However, literary critic Mary Helen Washington suggests that this is a form, in its writing and reception, that is dominated by the actions and concerns of black men. Washington argu
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