American Horror History: Re-reading Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

I first read Kindred by Octavia Butler back in 2015.  As I read it, it occurred to me that, while it uses the science fiction trope of time travel, it is essentially a horror novel.  The horror is American slavery.  The novel also encourages us to think about what, distinctively, was wrong about American slavery, a project taken up by philosophers such as Howard McGary and Bill E. Lawson.  See my full review here.

Fast forward to 2018 when I was planning a course on horror and philosophy.  I was planning to cover Du Bois's double-consciousness in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Victor LaValle's response to Lovecraft's racism in The Ballad of Black Tom, so I thought the horror of Kindred might make a nice addition to help us focus on the horror of American history.


Several students said they loved the novel, and it seemed to work well to help students dig into the issue of the distinctive wrong of American slavery and its legacy today.  One place to start on the continued legacy of slavery is Ava DuVernay's Netflix documentary 13th.  The students were assigned an excerpt from the work of philosophers Howard McGary and Bill Lawson, who identified the mark of oppression of slavery, or what exactly was wrong with American slavery, as the fact of owning human beings.

Stop and think about that for a few seconds: What would it be like to be literally, legally owned by another human being, to be property?  What is the distinctive horror of that psychologically, physically, philosophically, spiritually?  Can free people completely imagine that horror?  Can white Americans such as myself completely understand the continuing legacy of American slavery today?  (That first question would require a long answer, but I rather suspect the answer to the last two questions is simpler: "No.")

I enjoyed the novel even more this time, although "enjoyed" isn't the right word for something so horrific.  But then again, I don't think I've ever read Butler's work without being deeply affected by it in some way.  In particular, there's always some horrific element to her stories whether they involve aliens, the collapse of civilization, or quotidian human cruelty.

So, is this really a horror novel?  How is horror as a genre defined?  Could Kindred simultaneously be fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and horror?  I'm still not entirely sure how to answer these questions, which I discussed a bit in my previous review, although I do think the borders of these genres are porous enough to be traversed by someone as brilliant as Butler.

But there's always a hint of something like optimism for the future peeking out from behind the bleak, unvarnished displays of horror.  Maybe our only hope for the future is through a frank coming to terms with the horrors of past and present realities (something I honestly feel like America has never done with sufficient depth when it come to American slavery).  Perhaps Butler's point is that our only hope is for enough people to have the courage and resilience to emerge from these horrors to dream a better, less horrific future into being.