Phantasmic Reincarnation

Igbo Cosmology in Octavia Butler'sKindred

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4571908
AutoresStella Setka (0000-0003-4359-7540, Loyola Marymount University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen41
Número1
Páginas93-124
Fecha de publicación2016-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlv059
OpenAlexW2292302088
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas29

This essay argues that Butler’s Kindred (1979) adapts the Igbo notion of the ogbanje , also known by the English terms born-to-die , or spirit child , as a means of both spiritually and physically connecting its protagonist to the past. In its transgression of geographical and temporal boundaries, the novel highlights the inextricable ties between past and present and demonstrates how the painful consequences of slavery’s legacy reverberate today. This essay identifies Kindred as part of a growing mode of representation in African American literature that I term the phantasmic trauma narrative , a text that uses culturally specific modes of the fantastic or the supernatural as a way of engaging the traumatic past and giving voice to those who have been marginalized by mainstream historiographic accounts. Like the magical realism on which it builds, the phantasmic trauma narrative troubles realism’s distinction between fantasy and reality to problematize the notion that conventional modes of historical knowledge provide access to extreme experiences such as slavery while at the same time underscoring the potential of alternative modes of representation to communicate such experience. Through the novel’s ogbanje figure, readers are able to imagine a mimetic encounter with a trauma that they have not experienced and one, moreover, to which they may not have a cultural connection. Kindred bridges the epistemological and ontological gaps that the trauma of slavery presents by confronting its protagonist—and, by extension, its readers—with the past by drawing on a culturally specific form of the fantastic.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Fantasy · Igbo · Linguistics · Literature · Mainstream · Narrative · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Realism · Reincarnation · Representation (politics) · Sociology · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology