Kindred | 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."

The American slave narrative is a literary form whose historical boundaries are firmly marked. While first-person narratives about oppression and exclusion will persist as long as racism persists, slave narratives ceased to be written when the last American citizen who had lived under institutionalized slavery died. The only way in which a new slave-memoir could be written is if someone were able to travel into the past, become a slave, and return to tell the story. Because the laws of physics, such as we know them, preclude traveling backwards in time, such a book would have to be a...

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