In the 1990s, I analyzed science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1979 neoslave narrative Kindred by employing Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which focuses on how time and space are fused together and form a whole in literature. In Butler’s novel, African American Dana, who is its narrator and protagonist, is repeatedly thrown back in time from her house in Pasadena, California, in 1976, in order to save her white ancestor’s life in Maryland in the early 1800s time and again. In the process, she has to adapt to a time and place where she is regarded and treated as a slave.

This paper will focus on Kindred: a Graphic Novel Adaptation (2017) by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. How are time and time travel depicted in this graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s novel? How is Butler’s story adapted by Duffy and Jennings with 21st-century readers in mind almost 40 years after the novel was published? Does it make sense – and in that case how – to employ the chronotope in a reading of the graphic novel? As these questions indicate, my work on the graphic novel adaptation of the novel is still at a very early stage but I hope to be able to present some pertinent answers addressing time in this graphic novel at the conference.