Voices of Resistance Through Time: Power, Language and Silence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Abstract

This dissertation examines Octavia Butler's Kindred 1979 as a literary study that explores the representation of power, language and silence across temporal boundaries. Drawing on the novel's movement between the contemporary present and the antebellum past, it investigates how historical slavery continues to shape Black experience and identity across time. This study argues that Kindred presents resistance not as a fixed or single act, but as a continuous process shaped by historical and social structures, and that silence functions both as a tool of oppression and as a strategy of protection. Drawing on Michel Foucault's theories of power and surveillance, together with Black feminist thought from bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, the study examines how agency is represented within systems of domination. Trauma theory from Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra further illuminates the limits of language in expressing violence and traumatic memory. By integrating these frameworks, the analysis distinguishes between imposed silence, strategic silence and traumatic silence, showing how each operates differently within the novel's structure. By situating Kindred within these theoretical frameworks, this dissertation demonstrates that Butler challenges dominant historical narratives by exposing the persistence of slavery's effects and by rethinking resistance as an ongoing negotiation with power, memory and history. This study contributes to Kindred studies and neo-slave narrative criticism by proposing language and silence as structurally interdependent rather than separate elements of meaning.