Behind the strange land of shadows: Discursive violence in the novels of Toni Morrison

This thesis explores the ways in which Toni Morrison's fiction revises and reconstructs the African American past. Its primary focus, therefore, is upon the various interconnected, discursively maintained and reproduced strategies of oppression that have served the containment of the black social subject in America. Drawing on Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1983), Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992), as well as both essays and her work of criticism, Playing in the Dark (1992), I have shown how Morrison's fiction re-represents the violent effects of the strategies alluded to above on black communities, families, and individuals in America since the time of slavery.;First, I examine how the basis for African-based communal relationships transformed and then reproduced American-based social and cultural boundaries and hierarchies during successive periods of the African American past (slavery, emancipations, segregation, and the migration north). Second, I explore the effects of this communal transformation on traditional kinship roles, especially the roles of father and mother. Third, I note how these changes effected the daughters in particular. Finally, I consider the way in which Morrison, through her fiction, constitutes an alternative discursive reality for "her tribe" and redefines the role of "culture bearer." The antiphonal voices she creates in her fiction, through manifold tones and accents, challenge assumptions about the relation of language and cultural ideology; they work to resist established categories and ultimately create a discursive space within which the black voices in American can both speak and be heard.