Kindred | Essays and Criticism

  • Kindred's Outlook on Racial and Sexual Equality

    In the following essay, Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd perceives Kindred as a dark allegory exploring the impossibility of racial and sexual equality in the United States.

  • Kindred: New Slave Narrative

    In the following essay, Robert Crossley examines Kindred as a "new slave narrative," a work that could no longer be written from personal experience and would instead require a narrative technique which allows a modern-day person to travel back in time, as Dana does in the novel. Crossley concludes that Kindred, "like all good works of fiction, … lies like the truth."

  • Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in Works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Millhiser, and Octavia Butler

    In the following excerpt, Beverly Friend asserts that Kindred reveals weaknesses in modern women and inequities in their treatment that have not been eliminated despite the relatively better conditions of contemporary society.