Publication Date
8-6-2025
Abstract
Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? textually parallel one another in vital ways that mirror the lack of linear separation between the socalled historical past and modern conditions of racialized oppression, confinement, and brutal treatment. Through tandemly analyzing these texts, the modes of misogynoiristic control potently exacted on the enslaved/imprisoned Black woman’s body are clearly rendered across time. The presence of the plantation, as it follows Butler’s fictional characters through the literal medium of time travel, haunts the modern prisonindustrial complex, which Davis extrapolates through a detailed history of racialized punishment within the United States. Both texts illustrate that the controlling images of Black bodies as enslaved “haunt” the present, or, rather, that the past, present, and future for Black people lack clear distinction when analyzed as a continuum of evolving brutality and dehumanization. The essay’s first section is devoted to a detailed critical analysis of misogynistic brutality in the lives of key Black female characters in Butler’s Kindred. In the second section of the essay, Butler’s work is put in conversation with Davis’s seminal classic Are Prisons Obsolete?, delineating how the reality of modernday imprisonment is directly correlated with pervasive images of enslaved Black bodies descended from the era of racialized slavery in the United States.
Recommended Citation
Guntharp, Sydney
(2025)
"A Conversation Between Octavia Butler's Kindred and Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete?: Brutality, Misogynoir, and Haunting,"
Venture: The University of Mississippi Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 7, Article 5.
Available at:
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/umurjournal/vol7/iss1/5
