Toni Morrison’s Historical Writing In The Postmodern Context

History is one of unavoidable topics when it comes to Toni Morrison’s workswhich are dedicated to exploring blackness and politics. In some domestic scholars’opinion, Morrison’s protagonists, haunted by spiritual traumas and historicalmemories, can get rid of racialist nightmares by revisiting history. Although thepsychoanalytic approach, preferred by many critics, is of positive value in a sense,this dissertation places its discussion in the context of postmodern historical writing inthe hope that new understanding of Morrison’s novels can be achieved from thisperspective. The study mainly resorts to Hayden White’s and Linda Hutchen’s viewson history as its framework, namely history is textual as text is historical, thusbreaking the barriers between historical writing and literary creation. Firstly,Morrison’s works based on history illustrate the great significance of history to reality,with each of her novels corresponding to certain historical events such as slavery, thegreat migration, Jim Crow Laws, the two world wars and the Civil Rights Movement.This close association with historical documents results in the great popularity ofMorrison’s works as compared with metafiction that is difficult to comprehend.Secondly, a variety of techniques are applied by Morrison to manifest self-reflexivity.Such devices as unreliable or multi-voiced narrator, anti-detective story mode, magicrealism are frequently employed to expose textual fictionality. Similarly, the authoralso aims at revealing the fictional nature of so-called authenticity and objectivity inhistorical events. Thirdly, historical writings as a matter of fact are forever battlefieldswhere all sides compete for political and cultural dominance because mainstreamideologies and power relations are always present though often hidden in history.Through her fictional works, Morrison criticizes the socially enforced aesthetic beliefthat blue eyes and white skins are more beautiful, uncovers the essence ofconsumerism in modern society, holds that madness is the cultural tag put on somemarginalized people by the dominant class, and regards essentialism as embodyingdiscourse construction defending white hegemony. Morrison believes ethnic groups have a need as well as ability to subvert official records and rewrite their own historyin an attempt to acquire cultural identity and social recognition. Morrison’spostmodern historical writing, colored with some significant features like historicalintertextuality, self-consciousness, ideology, discourse power and subjectivity, pointsout a possible direction for the black community’s prosperous future.