The way slavery is portrayed in Kindred is very similar to the ways slavery has been portrayed in novels going all the way back to the civil war itself. One of the primary arguments abolitionists made was that slavery was bad for everyone because it made white slave owners amoral and caused great suffering to the slaves. While nowadays the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is remembered mostly for it's establishment of certain stereotypes, when it was published it was so controversial because it portrayed the way in which even largely benevolent white slave owners must do monstrous things to function in a slave owning society. While we would view much of that novel as naive, the fundamental argument that it makes and that was made by many abolitionists is still the primary way slavery is portrayed.
The way in which rape is portrayed as an essential part of slavery is also a common aspect of abolitionists arguments. Uncle Tom's Cabin portrays slave owners sexually exploiting some of the young women they own. Interestingly the North often used this as an argument against slavery not only from moral grounds but also because it violated their own ideas of racial purity. I remember doing a research paper freshman year on Abraham Lincoln in which he argued that slavery should be abolished because the majority of what he called "mulattoes" came from the south. While he wasn't going to just come out and say that this was because slave owners tended to rape slaves, it is strongly implied.
I don't mean this as an insult to the originality of Octavia Butler, in fact we could see it as proof that her portrayal of slavery was accurate, as other novelists writing at the time of slavery described it similarly. But it also meant that for me the aspect that was most interesting was the way in which slaves internalized the violence and became used to it. The children playing "auction" and Dana's own gradual adoption of the postures of slavery. While I'm sure this has been described before somewhere, most accounts I have seen focus on the explicit violence of whippings and the like rather then the everyday destruction of human dignity which Butler portrays so well.
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_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is certainly one of the more prominent models on which Butler's narrative is based (and, in terms of fiction, _Gone with the Wind_ seems to be the fictional work she's deliberately distancing her story from--as Dana tries briefly to read it on one of her trips back to LA before chucking it aside, denouncing its portrayal of "happy darkies"). But even more than fiction/novels, the primary texts her novel interacts with would be slave narratives--nonfiction, first-hand accounts of the slave experience. In fact, you're touching on one of the "postmodern" aspects of this novel--its aims are quite different from the slave narratives or H. B. Stowe's novel. A moral argument about slavery doesn't need to be made, presumably, at this point in time; Butler's focus becomes *historical* and engages with questions of how the 20th century (or the 21st) can understand or come to terms with this ulcer in our national history. The slave narrative is presented at a metafictional level of remove in Butler--the protagonist in her slave narrative (with her full return to the 20th c. as her "escape") is unique in that she has read and studied slave narratives herself.
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