In Kindred, why do you think Octavia Butler chose to write a book about time travel to discuss the history of slavery throughout the United States? In...

This is a great
question. I must admit, when I first heard about this book, I did think it sounded rather
strange to have a sciencebook about time travel discussing slavery in America! However, let us
consider what Butler achieves through such a topic. We, by following Dana, are forced into a new
realisation of the brutality of slavery and in particular the way in which ethics often had to
be compromised to ensure survival. In Dana we see a woman who tries to live her life from the
moral standpoint of a twentieth-century black feminist. This is something that, as she continues
to be drawn into the past and to stay there for ever greater amounts of time, she is unable
to...