Pele negra, máquinas do tempo: leituras sobre legado escravista e utopias através da viagem no tempo em Kindred e Dawn de Octavia Butler

While studying the bibliography of the course Afropessimism, Afrofuturism and critical theories of race, taught by Prof. Dr. Marcos Piason Natali, it was possible to identify the multiple sufferings experienced by the black masses in the world in the form of literature, music, poetry and essays. Sometimes, these sufferings are projected into images of another life, imaginary worlds where dreams entangled with nightmares constitute another sociability, marked by complex desires and evil legacies. In the following pages, I investigate what I assume to be Octavia Butler's aesthetic subversion of the types of time travel in the novels Kindred (1979) and Dawn (1987). Firstly, we will discuss what meanings can be extracted from the comparison between the forms of time travel, the types of displacement (present → past / present → future) and the forms of the machines - when they exist - that make travelling possible. How do Afropessimism and Afrofuturism intersect with the way these journeys take place? Is there a theoretical debate related to the legacies of slavery, as well as strategies for overcoming these legacies, that it is possible to detach from these novels?