Neo-Slave Narratives are an African-American genre that deals with the ongoing events of slavery, physical and psychological, on both slaves and slaveholders. They examine issues of work, violence, denial, unequal relationships of dependency, and the need to build better futures together with former oppressors (Gates Jr. and McKay). There are three types of neo-slavery narratives. The third-person historical novel about slavery, the first-person narrative of a slave's life story, and the telling of slavery's traumatic legacy to subsequent generations. While nineteenth-century slave narratives served primarily to educate white audiences about slavery, inciting and engaging their opposition to it, the audiences of neo-slavery narratives include contemporary black readers who must reckon with their own personal and ancestral histories of slavery (Vint). .Octavian Butler is a well-known author of neo-slavery short stories. Her popular novel Kindred deals with describing the struggle of a young black woman who is trying to escape the past both literally and figuratively and to gain in the process a higher degree of agency, or the ability to make choices of life. Butler chooses the body as the main troupe to narrate the protagonist's multifaceted struggle to increase her ability to act (Vint). Kindred chronicles Dana's struggle for freedom and self-determination primarily through her body. It constructs the time jumps, which forcibly move Dana as explicitly corporeal events. It presents the apprehensive and overdetermined relationship between Dana and Rufus, her white ancestor, in terms of the struggle for control over her body; and clearly marks the brutal legacy of slavery, imprinted in a character of the present... middle of paper... a way of helping former slaves and their ancestors face their lives of slavery, discrimination, and oppression in an attempt to build a better future for themselves and future generations (Vint). Works Cited Bast, Florian. “”NO.” The narrative theory of action embodied in Octavia Butler's relatives.” Extrapolation 53 (2012): 151-181. ProQuest. Network. February 25, 2014.Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and Jennifer Burton. Call and response: Key debates in African American studies. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2011. Print.Gates Jr., Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2004. Print.Vint, Sherryl. “Only from Experience: Embodiment and Limits of Realism in Neo-Slavery Narratives.” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (2007): 241-261. JSTOR. Network. February 25. 2014.