Memory Narratives and the Politics of Space in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon

Abstract

The African American experience in the United States is one that is mainly characterized as historically, psychologically, and spatially complicated and intriguing experience. To reimagine such experience, Toni Morrison commits her fiction to depict the agonizing reality of this experience using memory narratives and space as literary strategies to counteract the mainstream representation of it. The current research consists of an investigation about the ways how Toni Morrison depicts the traumatic hardships of the African American experience in her novels Beloved and Song of Solomon with regard to historical, spatial, and psychological perspectives. Through the historical perspective, this study seeks to investigate Morrison’s Beloved in light of her historigraphic project that focuses on the role of memory narratives in subverting and revising the metanarratives of the American history concerning its representation of slavery. The spatial perspective draws upon a discussion of the politics of space in Morrison’s Song of Solomon. This discussion emphasises space as a dynamic entity that transgresses the conventional perception of space as a mere geographical dimension and it considers space as an entity that is imbued with power which can both affect and be affected. The basic objective behind analyzing both novels from a psychological standpoint is that it gives the study a prolific context to offer a vivid and thorough description of the African American experience in both novel