| In this dissertation I seek to examine Toni Morrison's historiographic trilogy---Beloved(1987), Jazz(1992), and Paradise(1998)---as her attempt, not only to reconstruct the traumatized history of the African-American people, but also to reconceptualize the notions of race, history, and community by thinking through the idea of sexual difference.; Focusing on Morrison's fascination with women's love as the impetus to her creation of the trilogy, the dissertation attempts to clarify how Morrison's project "to speak the unspeakable" of African-American history is related to her ideas of love, feminine subjectivity, and sexual difference. What makes Morrison aware of the mechanism of love is what I think could be called her psychoanalytic insight, especially when this is understood in light of Lacanian feminism as it concerns sexual difference as well as feminine subjectivity.; Drawing on the vocabulary and insights of Lacanian feminism, each chapter focuses on the ways in which Morrison foregrounds the maternal space of primary identification not only as a site of resistance to a white supremacist and sexist society, but also as a site of reconstruction of subjectivity for African-Americans. Such readings also attempt to elucidate how Morrison reconstructs African-American history through "love," which is understood as a transference relation, based on the structure of primary identification, that opens up the subject to the unspeakable and the unrepresentable of history. A close reading of each novel leads me to argue that Morrison, in line with psychoanalytic feminism, privileges sexual difference over racial difference in the works that are said to constitute a "love trilogy." Finally, the dissertation explores ways in which Morrison reconceptualizes the notions of race, history, and community from what Lacan calls the feiminine subject position---a position of love that resists any and all totalizing or universalizing gestures. From such a position, Morrison problematizes the notion of race itself and offers a radical notion both of a history that contains everything and of a community that is not based on exclusion. |
