71 Chapter Four Transmedial Posthumanisms Unmaking the Black Body in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and its Graphic Novel Adaptation Nicholas E. Miller Building on the work of Middle Passage studies scholars such as Sowande’ Mustakeem, this essay examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and its graphic novel adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2017) as posthumanist narratives that render visible the “unmaking” of black bodies. Similar to the histories examined by Mustakeem, the processes of unmaking in Kindred remain mostly invisible; the unseen and undefined spaces between the past and the present in Butler’s novel act as invisible sites of historical labor and social conditioning for the protagonist, Dana Franklin. By reimag- ining the novel as a graphic text, Duffy and Jennings craft a transmedial nar- rative in which the unmaking of Dana’s body makes visible the liminal status of enslaved black bodies across time and space. The affordances of comics depict this unmaking by foregrounding the posthuman reality of black bodies as they negotiate other middle passages. For example, black persons in the United States are often seen as intermediaries between the human and the subhuman, the autonomous self and the enslaved body. As Kindred demon- strates, this intermediate status can become a space of trauma and violence, even as it opens up liberatory possibilities. In this essay, I draw on posthu- manist theory and Afrofuturist scholarship to situate Butler’s novel within existing conversations about her oeuvre and alongside posthumanist studies more broadly. I argue that the graphic novel adaptation takes the abstraction of blackness in Middle Passage narratives and renders it concrete, making the historical trauma of chattel slavery tangible through the literal and visible unmaking of Dana’s black body. 19_0429_Hill.indb 71 7/17/19 10:17 AM