sandy history as fiction

When I first heard from other people in class that Kindred had a lot of time traveling, I was preparing myself for a somewhat futuristic sci-fi novel. I was obviously wrong, but I also wondered why Octavia Butler would use a device like time travel to begin with if she didn’t intend on emphasizing it. I wondered if there was any other less obvious purpose. Most importantly, time travel forces slavery to be treated as a reality. When reading retellings of slavery, it doesn’t feel that immersive. Most readers today haven’t gone through or witnessed anything comparable to the atrocities committed during slavery which creates a bit of a disconnect. The reader is still able to comprehend the weight of what happened, but it doesn’t feel real. By placing Dana as a person from the modern era directly into the time, it feels like the reader is navigating with Dana. We hear her thoughts as someone not from the time, and all we know is what she knows. By positioning Dana and the reader in the...

When Hinckle Von Vampton finally figured out the Talking Android, I was a little disappointed at how underwhelming it was. He put in so much effort only for it to be intensely bad. While I was mourning over Hinckle’s failed creation however, I realized that its failure served a purpose: it showed that an imitation will always be inferior to its source.  Mumbo Jumbo ’s Talking Android aimed to infiltrate black communities and rid them of Jes Grew. They wanted to use someone within the community to “drive [Jes Grew] out, categorize it analyze it expell it slay it, blot Jes Grew” (Reed 17). Hinckle Von Vampton had Woodrow Wilson Jefferson be the Talking Android, only after using skin lightening cream, but after Jefferson’s father takes him away, Hinckle ultimately had Hubert Gould be the android in blackface (Reed 142, 157). Ultimately the android isn’t successful, in part because Gould’s blackface was wiped off, but in my opinion, mostly because it was grossly inauthentic. Hinckle’s ...

               While reading Ragtime , it was quite interesting to see how E. L. Doctorow approached depicting the characters in the novel. I initially planned to write solely about how Doctorow links both real and fictional characters, but I noticed a small commentary he wove into the book while writing the rest of the blog.                Doctorow tended to take quite odd liberties with characters who were actually part of history. Houdini, for instance, is someone so iconic that he’s well known even today, but Doctorow arguably wrote the boldest fake details for him. Just 30 pages into the novel, he wrote about a prisoner undressing and shaking his naked body at him. He then followed it by saying that “Houdini was to tell no one of this strange confrontation” (Doctorow 30). Doctorow filling in gaps that don’t necessarily need to be filled, especially with such an outlandish story, helps reinforc...