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This is to certify that the thesis/dissertation prepared

By Kwang Soon Kim

Entitled The Location of Black Identity in Toni Morrison's Fiction

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Is approved by the final examining committee:

John N. Duvall

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Patricia Schweickart
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Daniel Morris
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Title of Thesis/Dissertation:
The Location of Black Identity in Toni Morrison's Fiction

Doctor of Philosophy

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For the degree of ________________________________________________________________

I certify that in the preparation of this thesis, I have observed the provisions of Purdue University
Teaching, Research, and Outreach Policy on Research Misconduct (VIII.3.1), October 1, 2008.*
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Kwang Soon Kim

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THE LOCATION OF BLACK IDENTITY

IN TONI MORRISON’S FICTION

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty

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of

Purdue University
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Kwang Soon Kim

In Partial Fulfillment of the

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Requirements for the Degree

of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2010

Purdue University

West Lafayette, Indiana

 
 
 UMI Number: 3413899

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For Bokyoung, Hanul, and Dongyoon
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to my advisor Professor John N. Duvall for the encouragement

he has given me and for the incisive and detailed critiques of my work that he has

provided. At every step of the way, his untiring comments and advice helped me to

clarify the focus of my study and energized me to move to the next stage. I hope that one

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day I would become as good an advisor to my students as Dr. Duvall has been to me. I

also thank the members of my dissertation committee – Professor Patricia Schweickart,

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Daniel Morris, Robert Marzec – for their gracious advice and encouragement throughout
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the dissertation writing process. I am grateful to my friends at Purdue who have helped

me to stay sane through these hectic and difficult years. Special thanks go to my

daughter and son who have waited for me to finish this dissertation and spend more time
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with them. Finally, my dissertation is dedicated to my wife Bokyoung Kum whose love,

support, and encouragement have nourished me and given me the strength to move

forward throughout my graduate years here in West Lafayette.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………….. vi

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….. 1

Framing Morrison’s Fiction with Postcolonial Criticism………………………... 3

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Notes……………………………………………………………………………. 17

CHAPTER 1
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CRITIQUING THE COLONIZED MIND AND POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECTIVITY IN
THE BLUEST EYE AND SULA………………………………………………………... 18
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Reproduction of the Colonized Relation……………………………………….. 22

Forms of Freedom: Playing in the Marginal and Hybrid Space………………... 36

Notes……………………………………………………………………………. 54
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CHAPTER 2
SHAPE OF POSTCOLONIAL HOME: INTERROGATING BLACK IDENTITY AND
CULTURAL LEGACY IN SONG OF SOLOMON……………………………………. 59

“Strutting” Black Fathers: Pitfall of the Black Middle Class Patriarchal Vision..63

Interrogating Memory and Identity: Demystification of Ancestral Home……... 77

Notes……………………………………………………………………………. 99

CHAPTER 3
THE LOCATION OF BLACK IDENTITY: PARADISE QUESTIONED AND
RECONSIDERED IN TAR BABY…………………………………………………….. 103

The Location of Black Identity: Paradise Questioned……………………….... 110

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Page

Re-Mapping Identity: Paradise Reconsidered……………………………….... 128

Notes………………………………………………………………………...… 143

CHAPTER 4
RECONFIGURATION OF BLACK IDENTITY: PERFORMING BACK TO THE
WHITE MASTER IN BELOVED…………………………………………………….. 147

Into the History: Historicizing the Site of Memory………………………….... 152

Performing Back to the White Master: Resistance and Agency………….…… 169

Notes………………………………………………………………………...… 180

EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………………...….. 185

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REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………...…… 189
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VITA………………………………………………………………………...………… 206
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ABSTRACT

Kwang Soon Kim. Ph.D., Purdue University, May, 2010. The Location of Black
Identity in Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Major Professor: John N. Duvall

This project traces Morrison’s critique of the emancipatory visions that penetrate

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the era of the Black Power Movement and investigates the postcolonial vision of black

identity that Morrison attempts to shape in her first five novels: The Bluest Eye, Sula,
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Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved. During the last five decades, critics have noted

the theme of spiritual decolonization of black people in Morrison’s fiction. However,

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they have primarily focused on how black people have been spiritually and physically

victimized throughout the oppressive black history in the United States. And, those
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critics have more or less characterized Morrison as a nativist writer who sees the recovery

of authentic blackness as the primary condition of black liberation. This dissertation

avoids such nativist reading of Morrison’s fiction and pays close attention to Morrison’s

political representation of colonial relations between blacks and whites. To read the

complexity of colonial relations between blacks and whites in Morrison’s fiction, my

dissertation refers to the work of postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Homi

Bhabha and particularly integrates the concepts of mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity.

Reading Morrison’s fiction in the frame of postcolonial theory, this dissertation

maps Morrison’s literary journey and discusses how/where Morrison locates the
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liberated/postcolonial black identity. Embarking on her literary journey for black

liberation with the case of Pecola that records the bleak repercussion of spiritual

colonization of black people in The Bluest Eye, in the following novels, Morrison

critiques the decolonizing visions by visiting a variety of cultural spaces from Milkman’s

black middle-class home in Song of Solomon to the culture-bearing agrarian black

communities such as Shalimar, Virginia, in Song of Solomon and Eloe, Florida, in Tar

Baby to cosmopolitan white urban cities in Tar Baby. Morrison’s literary journey for

postcolonial black identity culminates in her rewriting of the official history that has been

represented by Western colonial discourses in Beloved. Rewriting the historical case of a

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black slave mother’s infanticide in Beloved, Morrison discloses that black people have
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achieved freedom and self-authority through their parodic appropriation of colonial

discourses even during slavery, which was the most oppressive period in the black
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history. Ultimately, Morrison configures postcolonial black identity as local, political

and “contingent closure but no teleology and holism” (Bhabha185). Thus, instead of
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designating a totalizing cultural ground for black people, Morrison locates postcolonial

black identity in the socio-political ground where cultures are hybridized, powers are

negotiated, and individuals are reproduced as resistant agents.

  
 
 
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INTRODUCTION

In her Nobel speech, Toni Morrison unequivocally recapitalizes what literature

has meant to her in the opening sentences: “Ladies and Gentleman: narrative has never

been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we

absorb knowledge” (Morrison, The Nobel Lecture). Even before she elaborates her

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points, this opening claim quite clearly expresses two important messages concerning her

literature.
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First, by announcing her literature as not for “entertainment,” Morrison

consciously places her fiction on the African American literary history of sociopolitical
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struggle.1 Second, while Morrison views narrative as one of ideological tools

reproducing the hegemonic knowledge system, she does not simply denounce it as a

master’s tool to propagandize its discourses. On the contrary, Morrison also intends to
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speak about the possibility of authors appropriating narrative as a political tool to

interrupt and transform the hegemonic knowledge system.

Despite Morrison’s statement characterizing her own fiction, however, the history

of criticism on Morrison’s fiction shows that critics have labeled her fiction in a variety

of ways, many of which Morrison herself resists. While Morrison has interrogated and

deconstructed Western knowledge system which legitimizes racist discourses, she has

also distanced her fiction from the identity politics of the Black Art Movement by

employing postmodern elements such as: history as historiographic; identity as shifting

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and malleable; reality as subjective and surreal, and narrative as multiple and fragmented.

Accordingly, Morrison’s fiction has invited critics to read her fiction from a variety of

angles. Renouncing some critics’ attempt to put Morrison in the group of white

modernists such as James Joyce and William Faulkner, Nellie Mckay argues that the

“essence of ancient, authentic blackness in her [Morrison’s] work separates her from the

‘greats’ of modernism which whom she is so often compared” and Morrison should be

read within the black literary tradition searching for authentic blackness.2 Jan Furman

also sees Morrison’s novels as “instruments for transmitting cultural knowledge” and

“genuinely representative of the folk” (4). On the other hand, Harold Bloom argues that

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Morrison’s fiction “transcends ideology and polemics, and enters again into the literary
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space occupied only by fantasy and romance of authentic aesthetic dignity” (2). More

recently, viewing deconstruction as a useful context for understanding Morrison’s fiction,

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Phillip Page focuses on “complex dynamics of multiplicity and unity, fragmentation and

fusion” in her novels (4). Arguing that “postmodern formulations of culture, race,
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gender, or the self … insist on the complex and ever-shifting multiplicity of such

concepts,” Page reads Morrison’s works as postmodern novels which “call into question

the unitary existence of any entity,” “unravel[s] the presupposed relationships between

binary oppositions,” and “privilege[s] multiplicity and process over any form of

essentialism” (4). However, Kimberly Chabot Davis shows a sensitive reaction to such

criticism associating Morrison’s fiction with postmodern literary movement. Though

“Morrison’s narrative strategies share some affinities with postmodern fiction, as

described by Linda Hutcheon,” Davis argues, Morrison “cannot be comfortably grouped

alongside postmodern writers such as Milan Kundera or Thomas Pynchon” because

 3 
 
Morrison’s fiction is more “concerned with reconstructing agency and subversive

political content” (254). Accordingly, Carmean comments that critics have tried to label

Morrison’s fiction but “the attempt to find such a label has been generally unsatisfactory”

(7).

Remembering Morrison’s dictum that “the best art is political” (“Rootedness”

345) and paying attention to Morrison’s ambivalent treatment of literary themes that

makes any label on her fiction “unsatisfactory,” my dissertation aims to show another

possible approach to Morrison’s fiction. I argue that Morrison’s fiction can be effectively

read within the context of postcolonial theory which deconstructs Western cultural

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hegemony but still affirms a denied or alienated subjectivity and represents the lived

experience of oppressed people.

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Reading Morrison’s fiction in the continuum of

postcolonial literature, this dissertation explores how Morrison experiments the kind of
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postcolonial fiction that has a ground (such as identity and history) but does not totalize

the ground. More specifically, this dissertation investigates how Morrison finds the
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possibility of resistance and subversion in the American history of black oppression and

how she configures postcolonial black identity not in a far and misty cultural space but in

the sociopolitical space. Ultimately, a postcolonial reading of Morrison’s fiction, I

believe, will legitimize Morrison’s opening remark in her Nobel speech that “narrative

has never been merely entertainment for me.”

Framing Morrison’s Fiction with Postcolonial Criticism

Even though their studies were limited to individual works, critics such as

Gurleen Grewal and Sam Durrant have stated the possibility of reading Morrison’s fiction
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with postcolonial criticism. In Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Structure, Grewal locates

Morrison in “a growing body of contemporary writers who are responding to imperatives

of cultural critique, reclamation, and redefinition” which she defines as “postcolonial”

imperatives in a broad sense (6).3 In Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning:

J.M.Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison, Sam Durrant also reads Morrison’s

fiction as a postcolonial narrative. Defining “postcolonial narrative” as “structured by a

tension between the oppressive memory of the past and the liberatory promise of the

future,” Sam Durrant argues that Morrison, Harris, and Coetzee share “a common

horizon of emancipation, one that exceeds specific historical instances of liberation such

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as the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Independence of Guyana and other
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Caribbean nations in the 1960s and 1970s, and the multiracial elections in South Africa in

1994” (2).
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More directly, in her critical book Playing in the Dark, critiquing the

representation of blackness in white literature, Morrison herself sheds a light on the

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possibility of reading her fiction as a postcolonial narrative stating the necessity of

“emancipation, one that exceeds the specific historical instances of liberation.” In the

book, Morrison overviews African American presence in white American literature from

a critical frame similar to the one that Edward Said developed in order to analyze how the

Orient has been the metaphoric Other of the Western in his foundational postcolonial

study, Orientalism.4 Morrison examines how “blackness” has been a necessary condition

for the articulation of “whiteness” in canonical white writers’ texts: “through significant

and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through

the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can
 5 
 
see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of

Americanness” (Playing 6). Significantly, in this critical text, Morrison critiques the

epistemic “not-me” status of people of color, which has been an important issue in

postcolonial studies as well as black studies. Morrison states that “in that construction of

blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the

dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me” (Playing 38).

Indeed, “the “projection of the not-me” in the construction of blackness marks what

Gayatri Spivak called “epistemic violence” of colonialism and what bell hooks named

“black experience [that] has been and continues to be one of internal colonialism” (hooks

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148).
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Morrison’s fiction quests for the method to transform the epistemic status of the

“not-me” that continues to drive African American people into self-hatred and self-
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alienation. In other words, Morrison’s primary concern in her fiction is to examine and

reconfigure black identity, which has been ideologically constructed by white racist
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discourses. Thus, Morrison’s fiction more or less centralizes the characters that either

suffer from self-negation or search for their authentic identity. In fact, the restoration of

decolonized authentic identity has been one of the important politics in early postcolonial

theory. For example, discussing the most immediate postcolonial project, such a

Nigerian postcolonial writer as Ngugi wa Thiong’o asks for the restoration of the

indigenous culture destroyed by imperialism and its tongue and the recreation of an

uncontaminated political space and literary language. In a similar context, Simon During

defines postcolonialism as “the need, in nations and groups which have been victims of

imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric

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concepts and images” (33). Leela Gandhi describes postcolonialism as a “therapeutic

retrieval of the colonial past” (5). Such scholars believe that decolonization can be

achieved through the recovery and reclamation of the pre-colonial, truly indigenous

cultural practices and past.

Even though the issues of black identity and cultural heritage are importantly

dealt in Morrison’s fiction, however, Morrison does not espouse such a nationalist view

of postcolonial blackness. In fact, Kwame Anthony Appiah points out the danger of

“negritude,” which refers to the theory based on the distinctiveness of African personality

and culture: “the very category of the Negro is at root a European product; for the

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‘whites’ invented the Negroes in order to dominate them. Simply put, the overdetermined
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course of cultural nationalism in Africa has been to make real the imaginary identities to

which Europe has subjected us” (Appiah 62). Thus, Appiah asks to leave behind “the
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language of empire – of center and periphery, identity and difference, the sovereign

subject and her colonies” (72) and recognize that “we are all contaminated by each other”
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(155).

Aware of the danger of negritude, Morrison does not frame her fiction with

uncritical celebration of essential blackness. Apparently, in her novels, Morrison

characterizes Northern black people as suffering from self-negation and self-alienation in

the white urban space. On the contrary, the Southern agrarian black communities such as

Shalimar, Virginia, in Song of Solomon and Eloe, Florida, in Tar Baby are described to

maintain ancestral values. However, in Morrison’s novels, the Southern agrarian

communities are not uncontaminated postcolonial spaces full of black cultural heritage.

Despite their hope for the discovery of a usable black identity, Morrison’s protagonists
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return to the agrarian black community only to recognize that there is no such a utopian

place completely satisfying their dream of safe home and authentic identity. In fact, as

“the Orient” has been constructed in European thinking, the desire for authentic

blackness is the result of the colonial project of defining black American as opposed to

white American. Thus, what Morrison tries to achieve in her fiction is not the discovery

of authentic blackness but the reconfiguration of blackness along with the “dis/mantling,

de/mystification and unmasking of European authority” which Helen Tiffin defined as

one of the decolonizing endeavors of postcolonial literature (171).

Through her literary journey toward postcolonial black identity, instead of simply

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stating the necessity for recovering authentic blackness, Morrison reconfigures black
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identity not as a static and mythical entity that can be geographically located but as a

mobile entity that can take a different shape in different (historical/socio-

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political/communal/spiritual) contexts. Furthermore, by dismantling (or hybridizing) the

binary discursive system of white/colonizer/definer and black/colonized/defined,

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Morrison illuminates the possibility of agency for African Americans and thus, the

possibility of resistance right in the colonial space. For example, Sethe in Beloved, who

the master’s history has recorded as a helpless and “gone wild” black woman under

slavery, in fact, is re-presented in Morrison’s narrative as a resistant individual who

performed back to her master the colonial discourse of “animality” planted into her

blackness and claimed the ownership of her daughter. Significantly, by describing black

characters that are subversive/resistant and mimicking/hybridizing the colonial discourse

in her novels, Morrison adds the presence of African Americans with agency into the

history of American literature where “Africanist presence has been crucial only to their
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[white writers’] sense of Americanness” (Playing 6). Ultimately, in Morrison’s fiction,

the location of black identity becomes the socio-political space where cultures are

hybridized, powers are negotiated, and individuals are reproduced as resistant agents.

In the pages that follow, I take up Morrison’s first five novels: The Bluest Eye,

Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved. These novels record Morrison’s literary

journey from the black-underclass to the urban black-middle class to Southern rural black

community to the colonial history of slavery in search of a postcolonial ground for

blackness. Thus, Morrison’s first five novels serve as good texts to examine the state of

spiritual colonization of contemporary black people and scrutinize the emancipatory

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visions, which penetrated the era of Black Civil Right Movement and Black Power

Movement.
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More importantly, I discuss Morrison’s first five novels because they

show a complete trajectory of Morrison’s search for a postcolonial black identity.

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Chapter 1 reads Morrison’s first two novels The Bluest Eye and Sula as texts that

record the cultural critique of “internal or domestic colonialism” which has troubled
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contemporary African Americans’ self-identity. In her first two novels, Morrison does

not actively reclaim authentic black culture and identity as opposed to “fictional”

blackness constructed through the white racist discourses. However, by culturally

critiquing the colonized mind of African Americans, Morrison professes the necessity of

postcolonial blackness and illuminates the possibility of postcolonial subjects who can

stand outside and against racist ideologies.

My primary focus in this chapter is on how Morrison presents consumer culture

as the major mechanism reproducing colonial relation between blacks and whites in

contemporary America. Even though slavery has been abolished, the white supremacist
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cultural norms still prevail through cultural products and keep colonizing the psyche of

African Americans. For example, in The Bluest Eye, Pecola takes “every opportunity to

drink milk” only to consume the image of Shirley Temple on the milk cup (Eye 23).

When she faces Mr. Yakobowski’s “petrifying look” reducing her into an inanimate

thing, Pecola compensates “the absence of human recognition [toward her]” for the white

images of Mary Jane candies where her “smiling white face, blond hair in gentle disarray,

blue eyes” are printed (Eye 43). Paulin, Pecola’s mother, abandons her family and

escapes from her harsh reality by identifying with the Hollywood’s actress such as Jean

Harlow. In Sula, Helen, Nel’s mother, believes that she can disguise her blackness by

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dressing like a white magazine model. Even though she is considered a symbol of
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survival by many critics, Eva Peace, Sula’s mother, fails in making her home a

decolonized space and does not save her children because she conformed to the capitalist
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white cultural customs. In this sense, in her first two novels, Morrison presents

contemporary African American life as trapped by “neocolonial” condition that is “more

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insidious and more difficult to detect and resist than the older overt colonialism” (Key

Concepts 163).

Morrison’s first two novels, however, do not simply record the pessimistic and

hopeless reality of black people in white dominant America. Morrison also illuminates

the possibility of resistance and transformation by introducing characters that stand

outside the dominant cultural values. For example, in The Bluest Eye, China, Poland,

and Marie (known as Maginot Line) take a very small portion of the narrative but they

offer the chance for laughter. Their laughter captures the moment of freedom. In Sula,

Shadrack, a shell shocked war veteran, affirms his identity and marks his presence in the
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social area through his personal ritual (turning communal in the end) “National Suicide

Day.” Considered one of two evils along with Shadrack in the Bottom community,

though blamed for her inability to make a connection with her community, Sula also

shows the possibility of achieving her personal freedom through her queer identity

transgressing established cultural norms.

In Chapter 2, tracing Milkman’s quest for identity in Song of Solomon, I discuss

how Morrison examines the possibilities and limits of locating postcolonial blackness

both in the black middle-class patriarchy and in the agrarian black community. In Song

of Solomon, Morrison presents Milkman Dead as a protagonist who takes a journey from

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his black middle class home to the Southern agrarian black community (his ancestral
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home). In the process, Morrison critiques two different emancipatory visions for black

people that are suggested by Northern black middle class patriarchies and Southern black
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culture. In the first half of the novel, Morrison scrutinizes the vision represented by such

black-middle class patriarchs as Macon Dead and Dr. Forster who believe that freedom
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can be achieved by material success. The middle-class black fathers may have domestic

authority but they neither become the symbol of freedom nor serve as saviors of

disenfranchised black people. Instead, the novel describes them as meager businessmen

who simply make profits taking advantage of segregation that has been set up by white

racists.

In the second half of the novel, by merging Milkman’s search for gold into the

search for his true identity, Morrison more explicitly starts to deal with the issues of

authentic blackness and cultural heritage in her literary works. Milkman, who has felt a

sense of alienation in his urban middle class home, is reconnected to his ancestors when
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he decodes the song of Solomon which children are singing in Shalimar, Virginia. Thus,

some critics have celebrated Song of Solomon as a text designating the location of

authentic black identity in the culture bearing Southern agrarian black community.

However, this chapter argues that Morrison does not present Milkman as a self-united

African American hero celebrating his identity. On the contrary, through Milkman’s

journey to his ancestral home, Morrison questions the legitimacy of the myth of authentic

blackness.

Chapter 3 examines how Morrison redefines postcolonial black identity in her

fourth novel Tar Baby. Unable to resolve the issue of authentic blackness in her previous

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novel, in Tar Baby, Morrison comes back with the continuing theme of locating a
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postcolonial black identity through two nomadic but self-interrogative protagonists

Jadine and Son who are respectively representing the assimilationist and nativist view of
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black identity. Instead of valuing one of either, however, Morrison disrupts the

geographical concept of authentic blackness by describing how each exclusive view is

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problematic and inappropriate to designate the site of black identity. More importantly,

Morrison redefines black identity not as static and archeological but as cultural and

transformable.

In the novel, Jadine is an educated African American female who has created her

new identity as a successful fashion model in Paris, the center of white civilization. She

hopes for her race (including Son) to achieve racial uplift through institutional education

in white culture of big cities such as New York and Paris. However, Jadine feels

alienated and inauthentic in the white middle class cultural space.5 On the other hand,

Son, who is wandering with fabrications of his identity, views black identity not as
 12 
 
mobile entity which can be socially constructed and transformed but as an authentic and

mythical entity which has a specific geographical ground. Thus, he hopes to take Jadine

to Eloe and to show her an authentic black community where, he believes, Jadine will be

decolonized and recover her lost authentic identity. However, in the end of their journey

to identity, two protagonists are still left without discovering the paradisiacal place where

they can feel home and safe together.

Importantly, Tar Baby does not end in describing the psychological dilemma of

contemporary African American people who can neither return to the past nor identify

with white culture. Morrison constructs the third space in the Caribbean Island, Isle des

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Chaveliers, to show a new vision of postcolonial black identity. In Isle des Chaveliers,
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black servants are mimic men who disrupt the colonial authority of the white masters and

destabilize the colonial system based on racial difference. In the white master Valerian’s
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house, the black couple, Sydney and, his wife, Ondine, have been ideal servants.

However, when they get to know that their master (Valerian) fired a yardman, they mimic
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the white master’s authority by claiming their right to know what is happening in the

house. Even though the white master tries to reclaim his authoritative position as a

master by reminding them of the ownership, the black servants are no more obedient

colonial subjects who the colonizer has known and stereotyped. Instead, they remind

their white master of their interdependent relationship by talking back, “Who’s going to

feed you” (208). Significantly, the remark characterizes the colonial space as an inter-

dependent hybrid space. In such a hybrid space, there is no single panoptic colonial

power that sweeps away other minor voices; rather, the colonial power lies on the

ongoing hegemonic struggle between the colonizer (wishing to construct perfect

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colonies) and the colonized (dreaming of completely postcolonial space). Consequently,

Tar Baby characterizes Morrison’s postcolonial project not as a modernist return to the

native culture but as the ceaseless process of hegemonic struggle between the colonizers

and the colonized in the culturally mixed sociopolitical space.

Chapter 4 discusses Morrison’s fifth novel Beloved. This chapter focuses on how

Morrison rewrites the history of slavery by giving narrative voices to black subalterns

who could not speak. Also, this chapter discusses how Morrison envisions the site of

agency for black people through her postcolonial critique of racial discourses as

“wildness” and “animality” which have been projected on blackness by colonial

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discourses. In Beloved, Morrison is no more nostalgic for coherent and mythical black
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identity that such characters as Milkman and Son in her previous novels have been

looking for. Instead, Morrison’s critique of black identity is accomplished through her
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rewriting of the official history that has been represented by Western colonial discourses.

By retelling the story of a black mother’s infanticide with multiple narratives in Beloved,
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Morrison rejects the white master’s monolithic definition of the event, make heard the

silenced black mother’s voice, and examines ideological forces that contributed to the

cause of the tragic event.

More importantly, visiting the colonial history of slavery, Morrison rewrites black

slaves as postcolonial subjects who not only suffered from but also challenged the

physical and epistemic violence of colonial system by performing back colonial

discourses to their white masters. The Western colonial discourse has associated

blackness with primitivism in order to justify their colonial desire and system. However,

in colonial reality, when black people act in accordance with the racial discourse of
 14 
 
jungle and wild-ness planted by white masters, the original intention of the colonial

discourses is ruptured and gets into “a space of hybridity” in Homi Bhabha’s terms.

Indeed, in Beloved, by performing the colonial script of wildness planted on blackness,

black slaves transform the script of colonial discourses into a site of agency where they

can intentionally or unintentionally challenge the slavery system and maintain self-

authority. For example, when Sethe kills her own daughter in the danger of being caught

by the white master and more intentionally, when Sethe’s mother throws away her

children born through whites’ rape of her during middle passage, they must have been

seen as wild and savage by white masters, which contributes to the justification of the

W
dualistic Western discourse of black/savage/other and white/civilized/subject. However,
IE
at the same time, through their wild act of replicating the master’s discourse, Sethe and

her mother maintain self-power and resist the white masters who ask them to be a breeder
EV
and sexual object. In other words, by claiming the ownership of their children through

infanticide, those black women might be compared to animals lacking humanity, but,
PR

simultaneously, they challenge the slavery system whose economy is to reproduce as

many black bodies as possible, who can serve as sexual objects and labor forces for white

masters. Ultimately, configuring the postcolonial agency for contemporary African

American people, Morrison embraces the poststructuralist concept of local resistance and

identity.

This dissertation does not discuss Morrison’s late novels, Jazz, Paradise, Love,

and A Mercy because I see Beloved as the novel completing her literary project of

locating postcolonial black identity. In Beloved, Morrison no more searches for black

identity in such totalizing grounds as Macon’s black middle class, Guitar’s urban