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Kindred Applying Theory to a Literary Text
“The Shadow” • “Common folk wisdom holds that we most dislike those people in whom we recognize an aspect of ourselves, and the history of racism and bigotry suggest that, on a societal level, individuals of the dominant majority use minorities as scapegoats on whom they project their own fears and guilty fantasies.” • “…it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one.” (Masri186-188)
Applying “The Shadow” to Kindred “Don’t you ever walk away from me again!” I stood where I was, my head throbbing, my expression as neutral as I could make it. I still had some pride left. “Get back in here!” he said. I stood there for a moment longer, then went back to his desk and sat down. And he wilted. The look I associated with his father vanished. He was himself again—whoever that was. “Dana, don’t make me talk to you like that,” he said wearily. “Just do what I tell you.” ( Butler 214)
Applying “The Shadow” to Kindred “You want to be with that white man, girl?” “If I were anywhere else, no black child on the place would be learning anything.” “That ain’t what I mean.” “Yes it is. It’s all part of the same thing.” “Some folks say…”“Hold on.” I was angry. “I don’t want to hear what ‘some folks’ say. ‘Some folks’ let Fowler drive them into the fields every day and work them like mules.” “Let him….?” “Let him! They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies. Well, they’re not the only ones who have to do things they don’t like to stay alive and whole. Now you tell me why that should be so hard for ‘some folks’ to understand?” ( Butler 237)
From “The Second Sex” • “…the self defines itself through contrast with an Other….the definition of the Other as a process of projection whereby the dominant part creates a mirror image of itself, investing the Other with all the rejected or despised qualities it wishes to deny in itself. This process is reflected not only in gender but in all relations between a powerful, socially normative identity and a marginalized party, including racism.” (Masri 179) • “How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it isnot the Other who, in defining himself as the Other establishes the One. The other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view.” (Masri 183-184)
Applying “Second Sex” to Kindred • What examples of subjective thinking—and blindness to the Other—do you see in Rufus? • What examples of submitting to Otherness do you see in Kindred? Why the submission? • Why does Butler have Kevin remain in the 19th century for 5 years?
From “Being and Nothingness” • “Nevertheless the fact remains that the freedom which escapes toward the future can not give itself any past it likes according to its fancy; there are even more compelling reasons for the fact that it can not produce itself without a past. It has to be its own past, and this past is irremediable. It even seems at first glance that freedom can not modify its past in any way; the past is that which is out of reach and which haunts us at a distance without our even being able to turn back to face it in order to consider it.” • “There is an unchangeable element in the past and an element which is eminently variable (the meaning of the brute fact in relation to the totality of my being)…Now the meaning of the past is strictly dependent on my present project. This certainly does not mean that I can make the meaning of my previous acts vary in any way I please; quite the contrary, it means that the fundamental project which I am decides absolutely the meaning which the past which I have to be can have for me and for others. I alone in fact can decide at each moment the bearing of the past. I do not decide it by debating it, by deliberating over it, and in each instance evaluating the importance of this or that prior event; but by projecting myself toward my ends, I preserve the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning…..Who can decide the value of [x, y, z] It is I, always I according to the ends by which I illuminate these past events.”
Applying “Being and Nothingness” to Kindred • What does Dana’s loss of her arm symbolize? • How are the past, present, and future all the same thing for Dana and Kevin? • What is Kindred essentially about?
