Reconstruction of black identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

This paper explores Morrison’s post-emancipation perspectives regarding the Black people’s movement and explores their identity deconstruction and reconstruction based on the reclamation of their authority and ownership to form their black identity in Beloved. Considering how these people were physically and emotionally exploited, Morrison sees the fundamental solution of black liberation through the recovery and reclamation of authentic blackness. To examine the relations between the black and white people in Beloved, this paper refers to the works of Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon to merge hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence concepts. Considering Fanon’s black problem in the facts of blackness and Bhabha’s hybridity and resistance theories, this paper traces Morrison's Beloved and debates how and where she locates the liberated black identity. Reconfiguring the experiences of a black slave woman who murders her baby, the author unfolds how black people attain liberty and self-authority at the center of an oppressive system. Eventually, Morrison concludes that the black identity is constructed on the socio-political ground where cultures are hybrid, and these black people are recreated as resistant individuals.