REASSESSING THE PAST: MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN TONI MORRISONʼS HOME

Ksenija M. Kondali; Sandra V. Novkinić

doi:10.21618/fil2123487k

Authors

Ksenija M. Kondali University of Sarajevo Faculty of Philosophy
Sandra V. Novkinić University of Bihać Faculty of Pedagogy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21618/fil2123487k

Keywords:

African Americans, American history, African American novel, memory, identity, trauma, Korean War, race relations

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s superior literary oeuvre reconsiders the American past by introducing memories of subjects who have been ignored or misrepresented in official history, with particular attention to their identity construction. Tis paper aims to examine how the neglected history of African Americans is reconstructed in Morrison’s novel Home (2012) through remembrances of the protagonist, a Korean War veteran. His attempts to recall his personal and his family’s past shape the quest for identity. Concurrently, the narrative about the characters’ fates prompts a deeper retrospective of American race relations and debunks the myth of “the Fantastic Fifties” in the United States. Using scholarship on this topic and critical viewpoints of authors such as bell hooks about home in African Americans’ lives, this analysis seeks to explore Morrison’s novel Home, concentrating on how identity is constructed in the process of the main character’s remembrances of the past and growth toward self-respect.

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