REMEMORY AND RESISTANCE: RACE, GENDER, AND POSTCOLONIAL TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED”

Abstract

Beloved, by Toni Morrison, is still an important text that explores the lasting trauma of slavery and looking at it through today’s theories reveals more about race, gender and trauma. I expand on previous criticism by bringing postcolonial theory, memory studies and intersectional analysis and this reveals that Morrison uses personal and collective memories to rewrite history. We suggest that Morrison uses her narrative to tell a slave storey and recount memories about the African diaspora to reveal their oppressed identities and sadness passed down through generations. Beloved, the main ghost of the novel, gathers the memories of their ancestors and honours both Christian beliefs and African traditionary views. In feminist thought, Sethe’s experiences of motherhood reflect that slavery’s effects are also about gender, as she struggles to care for her children alongside a terrible past. By combining recent research and analysis, we prove that Beloved (1) inspires its audience to identify on a primal level with slaverycambridge.org and (2) prompt readers to recognise the role of slavery’s presence in current timescambridge.org. Our analysis concludes that with its stylistic approach, Beloved brings together different layers of narrative and trauma. Morrison’s novel thereby not only reimagines the slave past as lived memory but also models postcolonial resistance by reclaiming hidden histories (Lifson; Koh and Kwak).