Narrative Disruption as Learning Tool: Teaching Slavery, Memory, and identity through Octavia Buttler’s Kindred

Abstract

In a fluid sociological and cultural landscape, where the dimensions of geography and time are in a permanent state of flux, the destabilisation of personal identity has become a critical concern. The theme of identity crises in literature has been widely studied, but there is little research on the psychological crises caused by environmental and chronological change in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Hence, the qualitative research, within the general paradigm of the Narrative Identity Theory, by using Roland Barthes’ textual analysis framework, explores the particular processes of identity fracturing due to spatial and temporal changes in the characters of the novel. The analysis argues that Kindred cheapens Dana’s affective attachments, moral values, and cultural attachments by placing her in a spatial dislocation between her modern home in California and the antebellum American South. Historically, this spatial dislocation is compounded by the dislocating system of chattel slavery. The protagonist is caught between two different temporal and spatial realities, and has no stable identity, which leads to the maximum of internal alienation.