Time Travel Narratives and Temporal Borderlands

This paper aims to examine time travel narratives through a borderlands frame. Anzaldúa discusses the historical and artificial nature of borders, how they are created by people as part of and in response to historical forces. Drawing on Anzaldúa's definitions of borderlands and hybridity, this paper will explore two time travel narratives, Octavia Butler's Kindred and William Gibson's The Peripheral, to examine how time travel narratives establish temporal borderlands between different historical eras and expose their characters to living along or crossing those borderlands. Kindred will be examined to see how time travel narratives can dramatize the formation and exploration of hybrid identities and their historical situations. Butler's protagonist, Dana, is forced across the temporal border from her 1976 California home to the antebellum plantation where her ancestors, both white and black, lived, forcing her to confront her own familial history and identity. The Peripheral will be examined to see how time travel narratives can establish borders between different historical eras to create allegories for our own. Gibson's protagonist, Flynne Fisher, is drawn into a trans-temporal conspiracy that allegorizes the exploitation that occurs across real-world borderlands. Drawing on these two novels will allow me to demonstrate the many ways in which time travel narratives can establish and explore temporal borders and their accompanying borderlands.