Kindred Themes

In Kindred, when Dana travels back in time to the age of American slavery, she knows she's going to encounter some violence. Yeah, she's not disappointed. What she doesn't realize is just how much...

Race is the central theme of Kindred. There's just no getting around it. America has a dark history of slavery and few of us take time out of our daily lives to think about what life was really lik...

Whether people like to admit it or not, slavery is a huge part of American history that still has huge implications for today's world. It is almost impossible to look at today's incarceration rates...

It's hard enough for Dana to travel back to slave times as a black person. It's even harder for her to do it as a black woman. Sure, she faces the threat of being whipped or beaten just like the ma...

It's fair to say that Rufus has a pretty messed up family life. Between his harsh father and his spoiling mother, the kid gets an awful lot of mixed messages. This helps explain why he grows up to...

You wouldn't think marriage would be a big deal in Kindred, since interracial marriage wasn't even legal in much of the U.S. until the mid-1900s. But that's exactly why marriage plays such a huge r...

With education comes power, which in Kindred is exactly why slave owners like Tom Weylin have strict rules against their slaves learning to read or write. Dana tries her best to spread her modern i...

If you could find one general theme that covers every issue in Kindred, power would be a pretty good one. Whether it's gender, race, or class, nearly all the relationships in this book cause us to...