Reproducing Time, Reproducing History: Love and Black Feminist Sentimentality in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Abstract

... I turned to say good-bye to called her name once. She was a pair of Rufus's pants, and she kept them with no break in her rhythm to indicate that she had heard me. Alice! I called louder. She did not turn, did not stop her and of those pants, though I was certain now that she heard me.... Good-bye, Alice, I said, this rime not expecting any answer. There was none. --Octavia Butler, Kindred above scene of Dana's leave-taking is most sentimental of scenes in Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred. It is also most problematic. Taken in its full length, it functions as a snapshot that freezes a black female slave, and renders her at once impenetrable and exposed. Butler develops scene from vantage point of her main character, E. Dana Franklin, whose memorial disposition in scene reduces Alice to numbing effect of labor and repetition, beating and of those pants (185). Kindred's disappointed spectacle--its uncompleted parting between Alice and Dana--paradoxically animates Alice's lack of engagement and makes it all-important element of emotion that carries scene. Thus affectively positioned as emptied variable--the token unsentimental--Alice is gravitational nexus for a sentimental drama that wholly disinvests in her dimensionality as historical, social, and political being. In fact, obverse might well be true. Generic variables notwithstanding, scene's interpretation and impact within text and among scholars replays a host of antiblack, antifeminist tendencies that continue to embed themselves in contemporary liberal analysis. To fully parse out implications of novel in these terms, I read epigraphic scene alongside two distinct moments of racialization. first is material transformation of temporal experience into what I refer to as speculative time. Speculative time underscores a correlation between whiteness and futurity that is secured through contractual investments in slave trade, investments that are sentimentalized into a historical narrative by liberal philosophy as developmental rime of subject. second moment of racialization is literary and cultural (re)production of violence in sentimental and abolitionist literature emergent in nineteenth century. Both of these formative moments rehearse elision of material and symbolic violence in their (re)creation of valued subject of whiteness, an elision that Lindon Barrett articulated in this way: The perspective of Other reveals relativities of value as ratios of violence .... Violence introduces itself by way of a violent agency, which it then seeks to deny. Value is a two-fold action, a presentation and a re-presentation (79). Through an interrogation of racial inflections of time and its contracted promises of security, this essay looks to understanding ethical pitfalls of eliding present practices for a futurity that belongs only to some. Admittedly, epigraphic scene portrays neither most startling act of violence nor most egregious, given novel's antebellum episodes. Its form of violence is instead elliptical--a naturalization of how we sentimentalize history, intimacy, and love to detriment of what I cal] a black feminist sentimentality. Black feminist sentimentality refuses speculative time as a temporal narrative that insures the future on continual violation and management of black female subjects. It is this investment in speculative time that shapes Dana's problematic disidentification with Alice in epigraphic scene--a disidentification that solidifies Alice's two- dimensionality in perpetuity. Alice's presumed emotional incapacity completes rather than disrupts scene's maudlin mood; her unavailable turn incites distress in reader as relationship between two women escapes closure. Through a critical reframing of sentimental alignment between Dana and Alice and between text and reader, this essay prepares groundwork for a black feminist sentimentality, a practice and recognition of affective refusal rather than incapacity. …