Franklin - Response to Lilvis,“Posthuman Multiple Consciousness in Octavia E. Butler's Science Fiction"

How does liminality work in Butler’s Kindred? (87-90) 

In Butler’s novel Kindred, liminality is employed in the way that the protagonist, Dana, is thrust betwixt and between the past the present, constantly entangled and alive in both. That suspension allows for the consideration of blackness and black experience, “within and outside of specific cosmologies of white power” (87). That is to say, Dana’s positionality in both the past, future past, and present is near identical, or is reflective through varying mechanisms and systems of power. We are able to address her lived experience and, in turn, larger complex systems that rely on the violence towards and the degradation of Black women. We are able to address this experience outside of white power because Dana’s body acts as the archive for the experiences listed above.  

Where I may depart from this reading of the Butler’s work is with Lilvis’ consideration that Butler’s disturbance of linear time suggests the potential for black freedom as opposed to a reification of the inevitability of antiblack violence (91). I am reading the temporal liminality that Dana experiences as both potentiality and reification. I believe this is more in line with Warren’s black nihlist theory. This could, however, be more of a case of semantics. Butler’s temporal liminality opens the gateway for radical freedom and identification of self because it allows for an effigial approach to identification, where there is consideration of the past, future past, and current present (all simultaniously acting as Dana’s present) when considering identification of the self. But even within this, Dana’s positionality, while shifting in mechanisms, is always in a binary with whiteness and maleness. This binary makes me wary of proposing an application of multiple consciousnesses.