Kindred

Florian Bast is the author of a scholarly article titled "no.":" The Narrative Theorizing of Embodied Agency in Octavia Butler's Kindred." (ebsco). In the article she analysis other peoples perspectives on the book Kindred along with her own views. She also interprets Kindred in terms of its treatment of agency. "a persons ability to reach a decision about themselves and implement them." (pg151) She talks about two main points in Kindred, the body of the story and time travel.

Bast goes on to explain that Kindred centers on a young African American woman's attempts to free herself from slavery as she fiercely struggles for agency, for control of her own life. Such a reading holds significant interpretive potential for Kindred as it can connect notions of corporeality, power, subjectivity, and resistance and is particularly productive in relation to the multiple jeopardy which Dana faces as a black women. A huge part in the book was the very first line Butler used. "I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm." (1) This shows that Kindred engages with African American literary traditions of using bodily mutilation to symbolize the destructive influence of a violent past on the present, this is another reason that Bast believes Kindred fits in with agency.  Bast believes that Kindred is considered an agency reading because an agency reading is capable of encompassing issues at the heart of science fiction which Kindred falls under that category. "I consider Kindred a contribution to the complex and politically charged theoretical discussion of agency in the last decades". (pg155)

Another topic Bast discuses is Butlers use of time travel, the central infringement of Dana's agency is time travel itself, as the jumps are reason for her life in slavery. When the novel first begins Dana makes a statement "there was nothing I could do, I had no control at all over anything" (113). Dana believes that she has no choice but to stay in the slavery days with Rufus, come to find out later in the novel she herself has to feel as though she is in danger to get back home. When Dana time travels back into 1815 the definition of Dana's body is reduced to property possessed by a white land-owning male. Throughout Kindred I realized that every time Dana would come home she suffered from some form of physical trauma literally during ever single stay in the past. First with Rufus's mother when she saved him from drowning. Second time was when she almost got raped and assaulted by a patrol officer. Bast explains that people have been neglecting the fact that the novel's portrayal of these increasingly extreme abuses as losses of agency over Dana's own body. "Not only is she obviously unable to prevent her body's abuse, but it crucially robs her of control over her movements, explicating the interconnectedness of agency, subjectivity, and the body" (pg158). One moment in the novel I found that shows her loss of agency is when Dana got caught reading and is whipped "I kept trying to crawl away from the blows, but I didn't have the strength or the co-ordination to get far.. I vomited. And vomited again because I couldn't move my face away" (107). Not only are they repeated demonstrations of Dana's complete loss of the right to physical integrity and her ability to control her own body movements, but they also end up influencing her decision making.

Over all the article ends by saying Kindred constitutes a particularly productive object of an agency reading, the text is centrally concerned with narrating the struggle of a young black woman to escape the past both literally and figuratively and to gain a higher degree of agency in the process.

As I went on reading the article by Bast I came to the conclusion that I do believe Kindred is an agency reading. There is so much to the novel that you cannot understand everything just by reading it once. I believe once Dana understood that her life was literally in the hands of someone else, she knew that she had to make decisions to help herself and the slaves and that is why I believe Bast is right for saying her novel is an agency.

The other article I read was just called Kindred and it was off of spark notes, this one was very hard to grasp because it only really gives a summary of the book itself it does not really contradict anything in the novel nor does it give anything for you to agree or disagree with. So for this one I am not going to write much considering there is nothing to write.

Between the scholarly article and spark notes, I would have to say the scholarly article was way more interesting and had way more useful information than spark notes did, There was many different things in the Scholarly article that  I found fascinating and that would have to be the whole agency deal. I never knew that really existed nor did I know what it meant and now that I do know it makes me look at the other books I have read differently. This article definitely changed my own interpretation of the book I did not look into that much detail of how she lost her arm and the symbolism of her loosing her arm. I did not take into consideration how her and Kevin must have been after she came home and the struggle they must have had to deal with becoming themselves again, I also did not even think once about how hard it was for Dana to kill Rufus knowing that this was going to be her last time to see him. What I still ponder is why Dana made the breaking point of her killing Rufus when he decided he was going to rape her. I know she came up with it before she left the last time, I just do not understand why it would have been that but not him beating her or doing the things he did to her before that.