Identity-Building In Toni Morrison's Trilogy: Beloved, Jazz, And Paradise

Since the Second World War, the legacies of colonialism, migration, globalization, as well as the growth of new social movements and forms of identity politics have put the question of identity at the center of debates in the humanities and social sciences. Despite its complex and even confusing connotations which result from a discursive explosion around the concept, one thing at least is clear--identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis. Therefore,"the eagerness to talk about identity is symptomatic of the postmodern predicament of contemporary politics"(Mercer 43). Accordingly, the issue of identity (re-)construction has become one of the recurring motifs in contemporary literature, especially in minority and diaspora writings. It is also a permanent concern of Toni Morrison, the first African American Nobel Laureate for Literature, whose literary practice, as Nobel Committee deems,"gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."This dissertation"Identity-Building in Toni Morrison's Trilogy: Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise"puts forward the notion of"identity-building,"a political and performative identity (re-)construction the subordinated peoples undertake against misrepresentation and Othering, as a paradigm to explore Morrison's treatment of African American people's struggles to appropriate their own spaces, and to reinterpret their role in America. This notion derives from theories of identification in post-colonial studies and cultural studies by Hall, Said, Bhabha, and others, which give us a means of theorizing history-in–person that allows us to conceive of identities as always forming, always connected with a politics of positioning. With its emphasis on revisiting history, its concern for on-going cultural negotiation, and its gesture towards hybridity,"identity-building"serves as a valid framework to summarize Morrison's probing of history, memory, and storytelling in relation to identity issue, and to conceptualize Morrison's ideal of an earthly paradise built on the principle of inclusion, not exclusion.This study focuses its analysis on Morrison's most important oeuvre, her historical trilogy Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, along with some connected discussions of her other works. Based on a close reading of texts and a critical response to the related criticisms, the present project examines Morrison's exploration of the African American people's identity (re-)construction in her deconstruction of their constructed otherness, her retrieval of their buried history, and, above all, her"intervention of the Third Space of enunciation"(Bhabha, Location 37), which shatters politics of polarity and challenges notions of unitary identity; in the meantime, the project traces Morrison's strategic building of her own identity as an African American woman writer, and analyzes Morrison's contributions to the American national culture and literature in the making, with the aim to discover strategies to negotiate a viable identity for all the hitherto marginalized peoples, and to find inspirations to tackle the dilemma of double or even multiple consciousness for the minority and diaspora writers in this post-colonial and postmodern world characterized by"cultural difference"(Location 34).This dissertation consists of five chapters besides Introduction and Conclusion."Introduction"traces the biographical and critic contexts of Morrison's works. The biographical context reveals Morrison's hybrid cultural background--a blend of both black folk cultural tradition and western literary training; the critic context shows a widening vision in evaluating Morrison's literary status and achievements. This part also points out some problems in Morrison studies, which, to some extent, are related to her hybrid cultural background, her subtle position as a minority woman writer, as well as her experimental artistry.Chapter One"The Concept of Identity and Its Significance in African American Literary Works"has three parts. The first part introduces the discursive evolution of the concept of identity, and explains some important theories concerning identification, and then puts forward the concept of"identity-building"as the framework in the following study; the second part deals with the theme of identity-building in black literature from the early slave narratives to contemporary fiction; the third part is a brief survey of Toni Morrison's literary creation, with special focus on her 8 novels, demonstrating Morrison's preoccupation with the reclamation of subjective position for the African American people who have been defined as Other in discourses of race, gender, or ethnicity.Chapter Two"Identity-Building through'Rememory'of the Unspoken History in Beloved"explores Morrison's painful putting together of the disremembered past of black people in Beloved. In this novel dealing with slavery and its legacies, Morrison, through the depiction of Sethe's as well as other ex-slaves'"claiming ownership of that freed self"(95), shows that only by confronting ghosts, by rediscovering history, are the characters who, like Sethe, live a long time in slavery and its aftermath, able to break down their constructed Otherness, and embark on the obtaining of a subjective position."Rememory,"a coined term in the novel, which indicates the complex remembering of the buried past, both subconsciously and consciously, both individually and collectively, and which entails imaginative capacity to reconstruct the significance of the past, is perceived as an indispensable step in the slavery inheritors'identity reconstruction. Rememory's implication and effect are symbolically manifested by Beloved, a character and ghost with multi-layered identity, whose mixed personal and collective memories stand for the repressed histories that need to be retrieved in identity-building, and whose desire for a name is the reflection of (ex-)slaves'aspiration of transferring from object to subject. Although Beloved at last disappears, her calling for love and recognition always haunts. In spite of Morrison's reiteration that"This is not a story to pass on"(275), Beloved, as a novel of rememory and for rememory, renders this observation intensely paradoxical.Chapter Three"Identity-Building through Jazzified Musical/Narrative Discourse in Jazz"concentrates on the analysis of Morrison's use of jazz music as a trope in her exploration of identity-building strategies for the geographically and culturally displaced black migrants in her second novel of the trilogy--Jazz.The first part discusses Morrison's delineation of the profound sense of dislocations the Great Migration entailed in black migrants"running from want and violence"(33) in the rural South to try to find a new life in the urban North. Through the narration of Joe and Violet Trace's story in Harlem in 1920s, Morrison indicates that to sustain a coherent and stable sense of self, and to build a workable identity on the new exile site, Joe and Violet, along with the other black migrants, have to undertake a series of negotiations: negotiations between past and present, South and North, village values and urban attitudes, individual and community.The second part examines Morrison's dealing with black people's jazzified negotiations of identity. In this novel entitled Jazz, jazz, as a polyrhythmic and highly hybridized musical discourse informed by principles of improvisation and appropriation, is not only related to specific experience of black people in the city, especially in Harlem, but also used as a narrative strategy as embodied in the novel's special narrator who is a hybrid of first-person and third-person omniscient, a hybrid of narrator and character with blurred gender, and in the novel's narrative structure which resembles a virtuoso display of jazz play. Above all, jazz serves as a trope of the Blacks'identity renegotiation in America at a new historical moment by giving voice to the silenced and unarticulated, by evoking call-response in communal healing, and by employing improvisation and hybridization as discourse strategies for renegotiating a social space in the"new world."Chapter Four"Identity-Building through Cultural Hybridity in Paradise"focuses on the last volume of the trilogy, Paradise, in which Morrison's idea of identity-building moves from individual bases to collective bases, and in which Morrison reexamines some essential issues in identity-building with more broadened vision.Part one explores Paradise's critique of essentialism and Manichaeism by analyzing the all-black town Ruby's historiography and identification centering on "the Disallowing."Ruby's failure sends the message that a monolithic, essentialist view of history and a Manichaean method of identification are binding and blinding in the reconstitution of both the individual self and society at large, and that employing a reverse discourse, which ironically repeats the white men's ideology, is not a workable way to obtain subject position.Part two examines Paradise's gesture towards building a hybrid identity. The Convent in Paradise becomes a"Third Space"for cultural hybridity in terms of religion and race, history and identity. Morrison suggests that such"Third Space"with its enunciation of cultural difference and its challenge to homogenizing, unifying force in identification, indicates a way to identity-building for variously marginalized peoples.Part three analyzes Morrison's reimagining of Paradise. Far from a utopia built on exclusion and isolation, Morrison conceptualizes"paradise"(with a small"p") as an earthly endeavor, constructed of a common bond and including all people. With its deconstruction of Manichaeism and critique of exclusionist and monolithic narrative, and its allusion to white founding fathers of America, the novel Paradise is a parable of national identity-building, a provocative allegory of nationhood.Chapter Five"Toni Morrison's Identity-Building as an African American Woman Writer"traces Morrison's building of her own identity.In terms of racial identity, Morrison employs different strategies at different stages of her literary career. At the early stage she tries to obtain the discursive position as an African American writer by speaking against"the demonization"of black people, and by searching for the black authenticity. At the later stage, once her status secured, she shows more postmodern tendency through her deconstruction of racial discourse and her critique of the quest for a purist racial category. Ultimately,"race-specific yet race-free"(Afterword 169) becomes a principle of Morrison's literary creation. It speaks for Morrison's conscious as a black writer; it also manifests her critique of the racist discourse.In terms of gendered identity, Morrison's positioning is subtle and carefully ballanced. On the one hand, she claims to have a special view of the world because of her gender; on the other hand, she insists that in writing novels she has never directly conducted a gender-oriented project. Her emphsis on the value of the special perspective her gender bestows aims to counter the disparaging connotation of the title of black woman writer as understood by some critics; her distancing from feminist line indicates her dissatisfaction with the practice of placing too much emphasis on gender politics, or assigning stereotyped gender characteristics, and shows her unwillingness to take positions that are closed.In terms of aesthetic identity, Morrison explicitly works to distance herself from Western (predominately white male) traditions in favor of situating her writings within an African American cultural and aesthetic tradition. However, this aesthetic positioning should be interpreted as a reaction to the tendency of judging African American art by universal criteria of Western art, and a critique of the idea that the constitution of what is called"Americanness"is separate from blackness, instead of as the basis to discover a singular source for her aesthetics. In fact, as an artist of first rank, Morrison's artistic achievements are closely related to her fusion of different cultural and aesthetic sources, both of Black art and of western, or Anglo-European, tradition, and to her challenge of the logics of some assumed dichotomies in literature and culture."Conclusion"summarizes the most important points made in the previous chapters by pointing out that Morrison'identity-building in her literary practice is aimed to change African Americans'position from being the imagined"other,"to being"choices"(Unspeakable Things Unspoken"31-32), and this identity-building is always closely connected with rememory, history, and storytelling. Speaking from a"liminal space"(Third Space), which bestows upon her"double vision"(Location 5), Morrison has offered unique descriptions and incisive critiques of American society,though her newly gained authority in American literary and cultural world has made her liminal position pregnant with paradoxes.