REASSESSING THE PAST: MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN TONI MORRISONʼS HOME

Ksenija M. Kondali; Sandra V. Novkinić

doi:10.21618/fil2123487k

Auteurs

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

Mots-clés :

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

Résumé

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.

Références

Akhtar, Jaleel (2014), Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

Baillie, Justine (2013), Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition: The Invention of an Aesthetic, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann (2003), The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia, Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Bouson, Brooks J. (2005), “’Speaking the Unspeakable’: Shame, Trauma and Morrison's Fiction”, Toni Morrison, Ed. Harold Bloom, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 7-23.

Harack, Katrina (2016), “Shifting Masculinities and Evolving Feminine Power: Progressive Gender Roles in Toni Morrison's Home”, The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol 69, Issue 3: 371-396, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/26536933 (accessed on 26/6/2020).

Harack, Katrina and Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz (2017), “Trauma, Screen Memories, Safe Spaces and Productive Melancholia in Toni Morrison’s Home”, Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature, Ed. Susana Onega, Constanza del Rio, and Maite Escudero-Alias, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 279-310.

Henretta, James A., David Brody, and Lynn Dumenil (2008), America’s History, Sixth ed., Vol. Two: Since 1865, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

hooks, bell (1990), Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston, MA: South End.

López Ramirez, Manuela (2014), “’Hansel and Gretel’ in Toni Morrison’s Home”, 49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014): 143-68, available at https://fortyninthparalleljournal.fles.wordpress.com/2014/10/lopezramirezautumn2014.pdf (accessed on 26/6/2020).

López Ramirez, Manuela (2015), “Hurt Right Down the Middle… But Alive And Well’: Healing In Toni Morrison’s Home”, Odisea, No. 16: 127-146, available at http://repositorio.ual.es:8080/bitstream/handle/10835/4837/MANUELALOPEZ.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed on 28/6/2020).

López Ramirez, Manuela (2016), “The Shell-Shocked Veteran in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Home”, Atlantis, Vol. 38, No. 1: 129-147, available at https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/issue/view/15 (accessed on 26/6/2020).

Morrison, Toni (1984), “Memory, Creation, and Writing”, Thought, Vol. 59, Issue 4: 385-390, available at https://doi.org/10.5840/thought198459430 (accessed on 26/6/2020).

Morrison, Toni (2012), Home, New York: Vintage.

Morrison, Toni (2020), “Toni Morrison’s Haunting Resonance”, Interview by Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine, March 2012, Toni Morrison: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Ed. Nikki Giovanni, New York and London: Melville House Publishing, 63-73.

Roynon, Tessa (2013a), The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

--- (2013b), Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Judylyn S. (2007), “Language and Narrative Technique in Toni Morrison’s Novels”, The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, Ed. Justine Tally, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 151-62.

Smith, Valerie (2012), Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley.

Wagner-Martin, Linda (2015), Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wyatt, Jean (2017), Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.