A Postmodernist Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

Toni Morrison, the first ever Afro American to win Nobel Prize for literature, is trying to forge a voice and identity out of a confrontation with the dominant white American discourses. Her novel Beloved  has several characteristics of postmodernist discourse. Boyne and Rattansi, in a critical reading of major texts of postmodernist theory tried to identify specific characteristics of postmodernist discourse. Some of the features of postmodernist imagination identified by them are the crisis of representation, the fragmentation of identity and the resultant privileging of pluralism and recovery of the discourse of the other, the dissolution of the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘mass’ culture, preoccupation with the merger of art and life, disbelief in the power of totalizing modes of knowledge and the resultant acceptance of polyvocality and a critic of dualism and binarism (Boyne and Rattansi 9-13).