‘Kindred’ Showrunner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins On The Process Of Adapting Octavia E. Butler For The Modern Age, Casting Newcomer Mallori Johnson, And Trying Not To “Aestheticize The Violence” Of Slavery Narratives
It’s been nearly five decades since the publication of Octavia E. Butler’s critically acclaimed Black sci-fi novel Kindred. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Butler explained that she wanted to write a thought-provoking novel “that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that Black people have had to live through in order to endure.” The themes of racial injustice, systematic oppression and trauma are, unfortunately, still an evergreen topic, but one that has always seemed primed for its own film or television series. We can see from the recent award-winning releases of HBO’s Lovecraft Country and Watchmen (2019) or writer-director Jordan Peele’s trilogy of films Get Out, Us and Nope that there’s an audience for adapting works that challenge, contextualize or expand the notions behind the complicated history of slavery and Black trauma in America.