'Seeking light in darkness and harmony in confusion': Death, Memory and Resistance in Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin and Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

The essay analyses how forseeing a dystopic future as in Swastika Night (1937) and time-travelling as in Kindred (1979) enable the authors to articulate a critical discourse on memory as mediator between death and resistance. In these dystopias that thematise 'founding traumas' the manipulation of memory is a tool to reinforce the totalitarian regimes, while the transmission of a counter-memory is a potent instrument of resistance and subversion. Memory and death are interconnected with oblivion and effacement but also, in these texts, with resistance and agency in conditons of extreme lack of freedom. Both texts also reflect upon the function of art and literature - as cognitive instruments- in the eleboration and re-reading of individual and collective traumas.