Academic work on Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and Butler is a towering presence in the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. A fairly new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre – her first novel Patternmaster was published in 1976, her last, Fledgling, in 2005 – is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. In the past five years, there have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021); and Parable of the Talents will allegedly also soon be published in the form of a graphic novel. A TV series based on Butler’s neoslave narrative Kindred (1979) premiered on Hulu in December, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations. These adaptations were, however, preceded by The Seeing Ear Theater’s radio or audio theater adaptation of Kindred, which aired in February 2001. 

In this paper, I will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; 2nd ed. 2013) in order to begin to discuss the three twenty-first century adaptations of Kindred: the radio play at the very beginning of the century, the graphic novel in the age of BLM and Trump, and the very recently produced TV series. As Hutcheon points out, “An adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture …” (142). In addition to addressing some contextual aspects, I will examine the adaptations in terms of narrative and aesthetic strategies.