Kindred Beholden-ness: a new name for kinship, from Octavia Butler to Ocean Vuong

This article builds on the gesture made in a recent reading of Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) by Judith Butler (2022) toward the adoption of an eponymous new name for the complex forms of kinship in the novel. I undertake a comparative analysis with Ocean Vuong's novel published forty years later, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), in which I propose “kindred beholden-ness” as a way of describing kinship in queer(ed) diasporic contexts. For the borrowed affecting term beholden-ness I am indebted to Christina Sharpe, who uses it to describe the reciprocated ways of beholding and modes of being beholden to one another that arise under the traumatic diasporic conditions of the Black diaspora. In the present comparative study, a two-fold beholden-ness is seen to be instigated by a queer(ed) request for the recognition of subjectivity. The appeal to be beheld, which is expressed through the coming-out of the queer narrator in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and made in queered circumstances in Kindred, becomes a bequest that diasporic others are beholden to reciprocate. Queer(ed) diasporic kin relationality challenges normative understandings of the concept of kinship, occurring, to cite Judith Butler, at “the breakup of the ground [of kinship] itself.” Kindred beholding thus becomes a reparative act that holds together the fragments of kinship, turning a once singular form of relationality into a multitude of possibilities. In discerning shared features of proximate diasporic subjectivities, the article informs transdiasporic discourses on Afro-Asianism after Colleen Lye and offers a renewed articulation of belonging in queer(ed) displacement.