Cultural Decolonization In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon And Beloved

My paper tends to explore the theme of cultural decolonization developed in the two novels Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, a famous African American female writer, editor and literary professor.In fact, ever from her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison has demonstrated a unique cultural self-awareness and kept thinking on black experiences in the dominant white society. Through her works she strives to create a space for African American culture within the dominant one and to constantly search for ways in which black people can best survive and preserve their culture & identity in postcolonial America. It is pointed out that Morrison sees writing as an intervention against the cultural anonymity imposed upon African American people by the dominant white society. Believing that Song of Solomon and Beloved best embody her thinking about conditions of African American culture, I find that Morrison's cultural stance can be ascertained through her emphasis on the importance for individual blacks to affirm their African American selfhood and for the black community to rebuild their communal & cultural solidarity. Affirming selfhood and rebuilding communal solidarity are both crucial strategies in the process of cultural decolonization and we cannot over-emphasize the one while ignoring the other.The introduction part of my thesis gives a brief introduction about Toni Morrison and her works, and the literary tradition behind and social contexts for her writing. The significance of adopting the postcolonial perspective in the textual analysis is also discussed and the postcolonial criticism is given an overall introduction as well.The first chapter presents basic theoretical frameworks on which the research is based: Franz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci's thinking on the colonized people's condition in political, cultural and psychological aspects, and Orlando Patterson's analysis of slavery as an institution and its damages to African American individuals, communities and culture, with various demonstrations in the novels. Contributions by these two novels to both the form and content of African American slave narrative tradition are also briefly discussed.Chapters two and three analyze the two crucial strategies of cultural decolonization reflected in the two novels: affirming selfhood and rebuilding communal solidarity, and the intimate relationship between individual blacks and their community in this process. Five protagonists—Milkman and Pilate in Song of Solomon, Sethe, Paul D and Baby Suggs in Beloved—and their respective struggles to affirm selfhood and group efforts to rebuild the once-broken communities are given detailed discussion.In the conclusion part, we reach the point that individuals and their family histories are embedded in their people's history and the process of cultural decolonization by African American people can be best realised within the contexts of their communities and culture.