Effects Of Postmodernism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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Portraying the horror of the Afro-American experience of Blacks in America, one should logically start by investigating the physical and spiritual traumatic effects that were imposed on the Blacks before starting to investigate their journey of emancipation with special reference to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977). However, this portrayal would be more effective if it is done within the framework of postmodernism with its emphasis on the past, on one hand, and on defying binary oppositions in general. The past here is epitomized in the effect that African-American heritage of slavery is represented to have on the lives of the characters in the two novels. In addition, the binary opposition defied here is that which used to be held between Whites as superior and Blacks as inferior.
Postmodernism is a general tendency towards viewing the world in its new context. It has many premises among them is its vision of past as a shaping factor. It “defended the possibility to break with the tyranny of innovation at all costs by agreeing the right to connect with the past” (M. Hamouda2012,p.97). Another term that flourished within postmodern thought is the decentered subject or individual who is taken out from his/her privileged position, whatever it is. Here, the Black person is taken out of his ethnic culture and origin and is directed toward an objectified position. This “self-objectification is another effect of the de-centered subject condition” (Hamouda

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