Remembering The Disremembered: The Problem Of Past And Identity In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jazz And Paradise

This thesis is a postcolonial study of Morrison's historical trilogy-Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), with the focus on the problem of past and black identities. Although slavery as an institution ended officially with Lincoln's Emancipation Declaration (1863), the discourse of slavery ideologies persists and prevails in the post-slavery era. Repression and denial of black identities by the racist discourse leads to a state of neo-colonizatioh. As a consequence, Morrison's characters are engaged in a constant struggle to develop self-determined identities by resisting the destructive forces of slavery and racist discourses. In light of this, Morrison's novels can be read as postcolonial.Drawing on thoughts from Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha regarding cultural identities, the "Other" and the "inversion of roles", this study attempts to demonstrate the significance of revisiting and remaking the past in African-American people's struggle to claim their identities in the postcolonial context. The past remains problematic for Morrison's black characters, whose lives are under the shadow of direct or indirect encounters with slavery and racism. A general trend is, owing to the brutality of such encounters and the pain in remembering, former slaves want to repress their memories. Such attempts, however, prove neither successful nor conducive to a true liberation from their mental enslavement. On the other hand, in their remembering that occurs occasionally, involuntarily and in fragments, there is evidence of a power struggle to counter the slavery discourse and subvert its domination. This struggle signifies the possibility of coming to terms with the past, and most important of all, indicates that active remembering is essential for seeking both physical and mental emancipation. For the generation who relocate themselves into urban settings to escape permeating racial violence in the South and search for a betterlife, the past is totally absent. Their disconnection with the past is both geographical and psychological. Geographically, they are now dislocated from the South, where lies the history of their forefathers; and psychologically, ancestors, the figures that would connect them with the past, are missing in the city. Persecution by racism and capitalism makes it more urgent than ever to touch the past, so that they could piece together the fragmented self. Having stressed the value of remembering the past, Morrison brings the trilogy to an end with a caution against a master discourse that regards the past as static and immobilized, which results not in freedom from, but in colonization by slavery ideologies in another fashion. Resisting the master discourse梐 central motif throughout Morrison's trilogy梒alls for seeing the past as open and malleable, a view that is free from the colonization of slavery discourse and avails to develop an identity of self-determination.The purpose of revisiting and remaking the past is to claim a complete and self-empowered black identity, which is denied of African-Americans under the slavery system and lost as a result of the destructive forces of racism. The desire to have an identity of their own to replace the one imposed upon them is found in black characters' persistent attempts to name themselves, and in their unconscious effort to resist the master's discourse that disregards, denies and disroots their identities. The significance of naming is emphasized by Morrison: "Once you have named it, you have the power" (1994: 126). Naming in her texts holds an exceptional importance in that it is a process to gain a sense of subjectivity.