Maggie in Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies

Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto

doi:10.1353/mel.2011.0034

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Barnes (1992) states that in media a disabled person has been depicted as pitiable and sympathetic (p. 7); which is apparent in prose narratives as well. Stanley (2011) argues that despite Maggie being older than the girls in the orphanage, the girls consider her as a helpless child (p. 75). "She wore this really stupid little hat-a kid's hat with earflaps-and she wasn't much taller than we were.…”

Section: The Symbol Of Pathos and Helplessnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revealing the Commonalities Existing in Depictions of Disabled Female Characters in Prose Fictions: A Study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Mounisha,

Vijayalakshmi

2024

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Literature has numerous dimensions, among which novels and short stories are worth the mention. Stories from the past have been including disabled male and female characters in their plots, but the question of how these characters have been depicted is still debatable. When it comes to writers of the disability study, it has been noticed that they have been trying to establish the present state of people with impairments with the help of their deformed or disabled characters. It has been witnessed that novels and short stories concentrate on bringing out the darker side of a disabled person by focusing on his/ her issues and sufferings. The objective of this paper is to expose that literary works rarely focus on the brighter facet of a disabled character, especially a woman. It projects the differences that are endured by fictional individuals. The analysis undertakes the theory of Intersectionality to support its arguments of projecting the discrepancies in the picturisations of disabled female dramatic personas in novels and short stories. Hence, the research with the aid of select prose narratives brings out the conventional sketches of fictional impaired women.

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Section: The Symbol Of Pathos and Helplessnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revealing the Commonalities Existing in Depictions of Disabled Female Characters in Prose Fictions: A Study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Mounisha,

Vijayalakshmi

2024

tpls

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“…In Twyla's case, such repetition occurs, on a milder note, only through dreams: "I used to dream a lot and almost always the orchard was there" (Morrison, 2017, p. 240). Stanley (2011) discusses this by following the example laid down by Freud. His use of 'condensation' and 'displacement' to analyze dreams inspires Stanley to interpret how the orchard is "a repository of meanings that haunt" Twyla, "a site of original trauma" (p. 75).…”

Section: Freud's Theories Of Nachträglichkeitmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”: Trauma, Testimony, and the Possibility of Healing in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Ahsan

2022

Sp.J of Dep. of Eng.

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Trauma studies as a discipline came to prominence in the 1990’s. Though Sigmund Freud’s theories constitute its foundation, the eclectic nature of it provides scope for including post-structural, postcolonial, narrative, and sociocultural theories to analyze texts. It analyses the influence of trauma in culture and society and the ways through which trauma is represented. American author Toni Morrison has always been pivotal in representing the subjugation, torture and trauma inflicted upon her African-American community through her works. Apart from that, her works intend to retrieve the forgotten and discredited history of African-Americans in her writings. In “Recitatif,” she explores the institution of racism in an innovative way: her protagonists, Twyla and Roberta, belong to two different ethnicities but she keeps their racial identities concealed by not attaching any racial codes to anyone. While identifying the characters’ ethnicities, the readers come to face their own biases. Simultaneously, they also register the traumatic nature of the narrative. This paper intends to explore “Recitatif” in the light of trauma studies. By doing so, it will delineate Morrison’s view regarding the different modes of trauma that afflict the lives of African-American people. Spectrum, Volume 16, June 2021: 230-243

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Toni Morrison’s Marathon Run Home to Racelessness in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise

Mason

2022

African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora

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Maggie in Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies

Cited by 10 publications

References 18 publications

Revealing the Commonalities Existing in Depictions of Disabled Female Characters in Prose Fictions: A Study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Revealing the Commonalities Existing in Depictions of Disabled Female Characters in Prose Fictions: A Study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

“I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”: Trauma, Testimony, and the Possibility of Healing in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Toni Morrison’s Marathon Run Home to Racelessness in Song of Solomon, “Recitatif,” and Paradise

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