“We are all related”: Edouard Glissant Meets Octavia Butler

Abstract

This essay sheds light on family relations in Octavia Butler's fantasy neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) through Édouard Glissant's theories of kinship and Relation. This comparative gesture thus relate Glissant's Caribbean texts to an unlikely kin, a Californian African American science-fiction writer, preoccupied with the hybridity of the android and the androgynous, with femininity and reproduction, and with dystopian worlds. Glissant and Butler do not refer to each other's works. Their kinship lies instead in their common realization that the postslavery family is a brutal yet inescapable enmeshment of blackness and whiteness within the Plantation walls.

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