Kindred

Dana is the protagonist who, through her connection to her ancestor, Rufus, travels to the past to save his life various times. As a direct contrast to the “white savior” trope in which a white person saves a nonwhite person from harm, Dana becomes the Black savior. While the white savior usually acts out of guilt or selfishness, Dana is—perhaps selfishly—simply trying to preserve her family line so that she can be born. She believes she can influence Rufus into being a kind person despite his familial and societal upbringing. She begins with this optimistic, modernist belief in Rufus’s potential for progress, but she eventually realizes she is from a postmodern society where this is not realistic. She eventually accepts that she must kill her ancestor to survive and that her ability to time travel might never make rational sense. Therefore, Dana’s character arc mimics the historical transition from modernism to postmodernism.

Moreover, because Dana, like Butler, is a writer, she becomes Butler’s alter ego as both try to understand their Black female identity in a historical and literary context. In a world almost completely out of her control, made even more so because of her involuntary time travel, Dana finds solace and autonomy in writing. She works a “slave market” (52) minimum wage job and gets little sleep to prioritize her writing career. She even goes against her family’s wishes to pursue her career because it is a way to cope with the many unknowns of her life. After returning to the present with Kevin, she tries several times to put her experience with Rufus into writing because it gives her some power over a situation she seemingly cannot escape from. Similarly, Butler engages in speculative science fiction, writing about the unknown, to make the uncertainty of existing in a racialized society more graspable. The act of putting something on paper, real or not, allows an author to simultaneously relive the experience and get some distance from it. This points to the novel’s goal of highlighting the past and learning to use it to survive.