Re-centering the History of the Americas: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy

Znanstveni rad - Ostalo

• Autor: Jelena Šesnić
• Autorova ustanova: Sveučilište u Zagrebu; Filozofski fakultet; (Odsjek za anglistiku)
• Znanstveno / umjetničko područje, polje i grana: HUMANISTIČKE ZNANOSTI; Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

Sažetak (engleski)

This article discusses the status of Toni Morrison as an American writer who consistently foregrounded African American history and experience and acted during her long career as a public intellectual. Morrison’s writerly agenda has been to delve into the epistemological origin of constructions such as race and blackness, placed in the context of their historical manifestation, such as transatlantic slavery as manifested in Morrison’s two most striking historical novels, Beloved (1987) and A Mercy (2008). Writing slavery, as a way to re-write the United States’ history and probe its dark spaces, places Morrison’s texts in a long line of nineteenth-century slave narratives, and in particular their twentieth-century avatar, the neo-slave novel, which strives to historicize slavery from the sufferer’s perspective. In the process, Morrison creates a “resistant text” (Sommer) requiring the reader’s imaginative and ethical engagement and refusing to fill in all the gaps. That the haunting of slavery still requires imaginative, historical, and ethical engagement, like the one accorded it by Morrison, is a fact of U.S. American social life to the present day.

• Ključne riječi (engleski): the historical novel; the neo-slave novel; transatlantic slavery; Toni Morrison; memory; history
• Jezik: engleski
• Vrsta publikacije: Znanstveni rad - Ostalo
• Status objave: Objavljen
• Vrsta recenzije: Recenziran - međunarodna recenzija
• Verzija publikacije: Objavljena verzija rada (izdavačev PDF)
• Naslov časopisa: Working Papers in American Studies. Vol. 4. Transformation: Nature and Economy in Modern English and American Culture
• Brojčani podaci: vol. 4, str. 91-120
• e-ISSN: 1849-6180
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17234/WPAS.2020.5
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:895488
• Datum objave publikacije: 2020
• Skup: Naziv: Transformation: Nature and Economy in Modern English and American Culture; Lokacija: Zagreb, Hrvatska; Organizator: Hrvatsko udruženje za američke studije, Hrvatsko društvo za anglističke studije; Datum početka: 2019-09-24; Datum završetka: 2019-09-24
• URL dokumenta: http://www.huams.hr/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/wpas_v4_huams_2020.pdf
• Vrsta resursa: Tekst
• Prava pristupa: Otvoreni pristup
• Datum i vrijeme pohrane: 2021-03-10 08:13:46