"We are all related": Edouard Glissant Meets Octavia Butler

Item

Titre
"We are all related": Edouard Glissant Meets Octavia Butler
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Titre du volume
3
Volume
13
Date
2009/11
Issn
07990537
Résumé
This essay sheds light on family relations in Octavia Butler's fantasy neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) through Edouard 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.
Creator
Valérie Loichot
Subject
ANDROGYNOUS identity
BUTLER, Octavia E., 1947-2006
CULTURAL fusion
ESSAY (Literary form)
GLISSANT, Edouard, 1928-2011
KINSHIP
PANSLAVISM
SCIENCE fiction writing
pages
37-50
short title
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
"We are all related"
doi
10.1215/07990537-2009-025