Octavia E. Butler’s Response to Black Arts/Black Power Literature and Rhetoric in Kindred

This paper argues that Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred significantly emerges from and responds to the literature of the Black Arts Movement and the rhetoric of the Black Power Movement that sought to erase or move past America’s history of slavery and restricted black women’s involvement and writing. Kindred draws attention to the absence of a (literary) history of slavery circa the 1960s and ’70s, especially regarding black women. The novel shows that, to grant black and white Americans a greater sense of self-awareness within the politico-cultural milieu, this history needs ongoing excavation and thorough research into black women writers.