"Postmodern blackness": Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and the end of history - novel by Black female author

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by Kimberly Chabot Davis

I do not seek simply to join the fray of critics who unequivocally claim Toni Morrison's novel Beloved for one side or the other (postmodernist or "antipostmodernist" social protest) while leaving the text's ambiguities and ambivalences unexplored. Deborah McDowell argues that the theory/practice hierarchy equates theory with men and marginalizes black women to the realm of social protest, and she calls for a "counterhistory . . . [that] would bring theory and practice into a productive tension that would force a reevaluation of each side" (256). I am attempting here to enact that counterhistory, to investigate how Morrison's fiction speaks to postmodern theory and, more importantly, allows us to reevaluate this discourse. I do not aim to measure Beloved against the authority of postmodern theorists, but rather to examine how each has represented the spectre of history differently, and to suggest the difference that race can make.

In her novels, interviews, and essays, Toni Morrison has expressed opinions and agendas that resound with the concerns of both critical camps - both postmodernist theorists and African American and feminist critics seeking social agency. Feminist and African American critics have often dismissed postmodernism's philosophical questioning of foundationalism and essentialism as being incompatible with their sociopolitical criticism (Fraser 20-21). Morrison herself acknowledges and occasionally reifies this rift by defining herself in interviews as an antipostmodernist author of black-topic texts, written to pass on agency to her black readers ("Living Memory" 11). Certainly, Morrison's works seem to be defined by the prefixes "pre" or "re" rather than "post"; in Beloved, she is more concerned with origins, cycles, and reconstructing agency than with decadence and self-parody. Both Beloved and her novel Jazz are set in time periods of birth and regeneration - the age of Reconstruction after the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.(3)

Despite her reluctance to associate her work with postmodernism, I believe that Morrison has produced the kind of hybrid cultural work that socialist feminist Donna Haraway calls for. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Haraway writes:

Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world. . . . So, I think my problem and "our" problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world. (187)

Haraway underscores the urgent need for new and better "her-stories" that might empower women but that are still informed by poststructuralism's denaturalizing critique, and for narratives that attempt to approximate "true history" while remaining aware of the limits and impossibility of truth or of any historical metanarrative. Morrison's work can be compared to Haraway's in its recognition of this dual process; although Morrison demystifies master historical narratives, she also wants to raise "real" or authentic African American history in its place. She deconstructs while she reconstructs, tapping the well of African American "presence."(4) As Anthony Hilfer has suggested, Morrison's novels offers a "both-and," dialectical, indeterminate character, a doubleness that Linda Hutcheon would argue is itself a distinctly postmodern strategy (Hilfer 91).