To cite this text: DoŶaldsoŶ, EileeŶ. ϮϬϭ4. A coŶtested freedoŵ: The fragile future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, in English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies, 31:2, 94-107. A contested freedom: the fragile future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred Eileen Donaldson Department of English Studies University of South Africa donale@unisa.ac.za Most scholarship that addresses Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred focuses on its value as a forerunner of the neo-slave narrative in African-American literature, and thus the manner in which traces of the past affect the protagonist’s present in the novel. However, given Butler’s established fixation with the future, I contend that one may also read Kindred from a futurist perspective. I find that Butler’s vision of the future in this novel is pessimistic because the protagonist fails to resist the white, patriarchal authority perpetuated in patrilinear time in a definitive manner, so that the liberatory trajectory of the novel ultimately fails. Because of this, Butler’s pessimistic vision of t he future is one in which racism and sexism may well continue to haunt African-American experience. Keywords: Octavia Butler, feminist science fiction, feminist speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, second wave feminism, time travel, patrilinear time, postmodern slave narrative, feminist agency, feminist futures. In his novel 1984 George Orwell sums up the power of The Party thus: ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past’ (2004, 309). His dystopian dismissal of free will is born of the belief that time is controlled by those in power: history is rearranged to suit the Party’s political agenda and the future, that utopian space that allows for better alternatives, is inadequate to defy dystopian power structures because it is restricted by the shaping power of the past and present. Those in power therefore control human being through their control of time and what possibilities time may offer humanity. Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel, Kindred, explores much the same problem, albeit from a different perspective than Orwell’s dystopian SF novel. In Kindred the past bleeds into the present and, I argue, affects the future because for all the superficial progress of the present, those in power have not changed substantially and nor have the prejudices they perpetuate. In Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred her African-American, female protagonist, Edana (Dana) Franklin, travels through time from 1976 to the antebellum days of slavery to save the life of her white, patriarchal, slave-owning ancestor. Not one to shrink from uncomfortable truths and difficult questions, Butler explores the relationship between them, suggesting that the legacy of slavery which connects these two characters through time and space reveals the illusory ‘progress’ of the present for what it is and, I argue, unsettles the promise of the future. It is significant that Kindred is considered canonical by the scholars of two seemingly disparate literary genres: science fiction and African- American literature. The reason for this is that, while science fiction (SF) scholars lay claim to the novel because of its fantastic time travel, scholars in both fields have concentrated on the novel’s value as a forerunner of the neo-slave narrative that emerged in the late twentieth century in the United States (Yaszek 2003, Spaulding 2005, Hampton 2006, Vint 2007, Flagel 2012). As such, much of this current scholarship focuses on the fact that the novel can be read as part of the African- American project to recuperate the past and explore the lingering effects of slavery on contemporary American culture, reminding black and white Americans alike that slavery’s legacy of violence, oppression, racism and sexism is not contained by history but continues to ‘bleed itself into a supposedly enlightened present’ (Steinberg 2004, 468). Throughout the novel Butler foregrounds uncomfortable parallels between the worlds of 1976 Los Angeles and 1819 Maryland, firmly establishing that the Emancipation Proclamation has not resulted in ‘freedom’ for black Americans (Vint 2007, 243). She suggests that what freedoms Dana may enjoy in the present are complicated by a persistent racism and sexism embedded in the fabric of everyday American culture, clearly criticising both the past and present. However, what the scholars mentioned