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The IUP Journal of English Studies :
History in Inquisition: Postmodernist Poetics in Toni Morrisons Beloved
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Toni Morrison's trilogy comprising Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997) by "remembering" and reimagining cartographies of history, critiques explicitly the idealist historiography and subvert the absolutism of grand historical metanarratives. For instance, Beloved, by both deliberately positing a liminal figure like Sethe and foregrounding her horror-driven story of slavery, poses a threat to integrity and presumed continuum of history; while Jazz and Paradise reconsider and reassess the cultural and political history of the black community, respectively. In so doing, these novels as documents participate in the postmodern project of subverting historiographical hegemony, and thereby, problematize the status of history, historicity, and historiography. This emphasis on historical relativism, contingency, and questioning of epistemological/ontological status of history binds Morrison's novels with the central concerns of postmodernist historiography, particularly with the theoretical postulates of critics such as Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Roland Barthes and Linda Hutcheon. In the light of theoretical insights from these postmodern critics, this essay seeks to substantiate the notion of revisionist historiography and reconstruction in Morrison's trilogy. Broadly stated, our aim is to locate Morrison's Beloved in the interstices of history, historiography and literature in order to explicate the postmodernist poetics of history as exemplified in the novel. Among other questions, the essay seeks to investigate Morrison's narrative and thematic modes that aid the author in this exemplary decolonization and also her larger aims behind the postmodern strategy of remapping.

America leads to Africa; the nations of Europe and Asia meet in Australia; the margins of the nation displace the center; the peoples of the periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis.Toni Morrison's trilogy comprising Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998) realigns cartographies of dominant histories and interrogates historical methodologies through inscribing subaltern narratives. Further, these fictional discourses critique history's reductive comprehension of multiple realties, as history's disciplinary sense tends to undermine an extremely intricate social causation. In so doing, these quasi-historical novels as documents participate in the postmodern project of catechizing the absolutism of the grand historical metanarratives and canonical historiographical exercises.

 
 
 

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