If Mumbo Jumbo is a novel concerned with national and international power struggles between Jes Grew and the Wallflower Order, and Slaughter-House Five is about the effects of war (the epitome of international power struggles) on a generation of boys like Billy Pilgrim, then Kindred analyzes a very different type of power struggle, the power struggles in everyday human interactions and relationships.
Octavia Butler really focuses on the small shifts in power in the relationships between masters and slaves, and people from the future, in the ante-bellum south. Her book doesn't have as many slap-in-the-face postmodernist forms, in part I think because she is less interested in discussing the mega power struggles than she is in putting normal relationships under a microscopic and trying to understand how slavery affects people in the past, and how it still affects people in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment