Canon Fodder and the Intimacy of Dialogues

Michael Burawoy’s 2021 essay, “Decolonizing Sociology: The Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois,” forges dialogues between the scholar denied and established theorists with the aim of reconstructing the sociological canon. My commentary situates the author’s essay and his own Du Boisian turn in a long career dedicated to reflexive science and recomposing theory. I reflect on the seemingly innocuous notion of a dialogue itself: its implications for sociological theory and practice, and how it supports decolonial efforts. Thinking with Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Lisa Lowe, and others, I offer a sketch of a decolonial methodology—what I call a Du Boisian shadowplay—that brings into view the intimate dimensions of imperialism. Ultimately, such a feminist methodology reconstructs dialogues that reflect on researcher standpoints and nested imperial histories; and in the face of today’s social crises, nurtures dialogues that are animated by an ethic of love.

Portrayal of Free Spirit in Adrienne Rich’s Aunt Jennifer’s Tiger and Alice Walker’s Meridian

The works of women writers of USA have become increasingly visible in the academy especially since 1970s because of their active involvement in contemporary women’s movement. Writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and poets like Maya Angelou and Adrienne Rich and others have been strongly greeted for their ideologies. Undoubtedly, their works echo strong resistance against racism, patriarchism and militarism. The present paper highlights the remedy of the various maladies like male dominance, subordinated identity and submissive life. It is said that ‘every action has reaction’ and these writers believe that ‘”FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE”. So they have depicted the undaunted spirits among their female protagonists who fought bravely against the odds and eventually emerged victorious.

Stylistic analysis of sarcasm in some selected extracts of schoolteacher in Morrison’s beloved

Sarcasm is a manipulative concept which can be utilized in different forms and different senses to express different intentions. Toni Morrison makes full use of linguistic and figurative tools to express her sarcastic events and situations. Thus, this paper investigates the stylistic use of sarcasm in some selected extracts of Schoolteacher in Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ , focusing on the purposes behind the use of sarcasm in this novel. Five extracts are selected to be stylistically analyzed in terms of Leech and Short’s (2007) model. The paper concludes that Morrison utilizes lexical, grammatical and figurative devices to depict the schoolteacher’s sarcastic views and events concerning slaving black people.

Memory, Re-memory and Post-memory

For the Indian diaspora their new lives in the Imperial colonies became the present and the country left behind became memory. As the diasporics tried to recall the past, they dealt in what Toni Morrison has called the act of re-memory. Pheroze Nowrojee’s re-telling of the tale of his grandfather, who went from India to Kenya to run the trains on what was then called the Uganda Railways, is a case of re-memory, as the private memories of an earlier generation are etched into public and even national spaces of independent Kenya. There is also what Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory which can also be considered in the case of diasporic writing. While A Kenyan Journey (2014) tells the story of the author’s grandfather, it is much more than just a Parsi Zoroastrian family’s memoir. Intertwined in the grandfather’s story are the wider narratives of colonialism and old and new homelands.

Exacavating the Memory of Slavery in Léonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre (2013) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988)

Regarded as a state of servitude through which an individual or a group of persons is compelled to work their guts out without any possibility to get compensated or rewarded, slavery, for some centuries, had been implemented under various forms from one country to another. From the antiquity to the twentieth century, thralldom had been a profitable business that gangrened the African continent. Thus being, African and African American thinkers shoulder the mission to dust archives and lift the curtain of history to retell and re-narrate the episode of drudgery; among them Leonoa Miano and Toni Morrison. The purpose of this article is to examine the trauma of slavery from a comparative, matrifocal, and Afrocentric perspective so as to highlight commonalities and differences between Leonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Inspired by the infamous history of slavery, these two award-winning novels not only conjure up the ordeal of slavery, but they also catalyze its haunting memory for the sake of healing, so that both characters and readers could be cleansed off its tantalizing grip and achieve catharsis and redemption. To this end, La Saison de l’ombre and Beloved are woven around feminine counter-narratives that exhibit counter-memories which are often glossed over or overlooked in both African and Euro-American phallocentric official narratives. Whereas La Saison de l’ombre spotlights the Africans’ role in the process of slavery, Beloved highlights the tragedy of a maternal love in a context of bondage. Through a comparative approach, we have spotlighted the whole process of slavery, from the captivity in Africa to enslavement in America.

Childhood is “not a story to pass on”: Trauma and Memory Paradox in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

This paper examines how Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child is structured around the paradox of memory; that is, the need to remember and to disremember the past. On the one hand, Bride has to relive her memory in order to confess her lies and in order to find her authentic self. On the other hand, Booker has to forget the past in order to conduct an active life. Memory centralizes Booker as the African voice when he relates the story of his brother’s abuse, that is to say, the abuse of the African culture. But, at the same time, it decentralizes him from the future projects he desires to achieve since he spends most of his time lamenting the loss of his brother. Bride, at first, believes that memory is the worst thing about healing, but, then, she realizes the reverse. By remembering the past, Bride reaches recovery. She becomes the mother figure of her Black community who wears the earrings of wisdom, spirituality and culture. Keywords: Toni Morrison, God Help the Child, the paradox of memory, childhood and trauma

Existential Dilemma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison verbalizes in novel manners the pain and battle of a traumatized self and local area. In her novels, the traumatic truth of a dark self shows itself in the characters' self-hatred and self-disdain, and in the deficiency of their individual and cultural identity. Her fiction resolves issues of African American history, traumatizing experience and identity, often additionally captivating with inquiries of sex and sex, and, less significantly, class. When writing in a climate where everything except a couple of dark writers battled for acknowledgment, presently the subject of much recognition, Morrison’s work has provoked various and assorted basic reactions. The Beloved and Song of Solomon utilize the devices of disruption, corruption and sensuality to portray the traumatic encounters of the Black ladies’ heroes. During the last fifteen or so years grant treating the Morrison oeuvre has blossomed, making her clearly quite possibly the most talked about creators of the contemporary time frame. Toni Morrison’s In her novel, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison shows the overwhelming impacts of slavery and its specialist disasters as these impacts show themselves through numerous ages of one family. The trauma of slavery is with the end goal that nobody contacted by it can break liberated from the past, even a long time after actual freedom. This is valid for the novel's hero, Sethe, a once in the past oppressed lady living in Cincinnati after the Civil War and third novel Song of Solomon (1977) goes about as a milestone in her profession, since it uncovers the imaginative development she has acquired, and furthermore presents the arrangement she has observed to tackle the overwhelming issues she depicts in her initially traumatizing novel. The distinctive traumatic occasions make Morrison's novels appropriate for logo helpful perusing and examination.

The Elements of Supernatural and Magic Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

The present research paper is a study of the elements of Magic Realism and the supernatural elements in the novel, Beloved by the Nobel laureate novelist Toni Morrison. The term Magic Realism was originally applied in the 1920s to the school of surrealist German painters and was later used to describe the process fiction of writers like George Luis Burges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie etc. These writers weave a sharply etched realism representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dream-like elements, as well as with material derived from myth and fairy tales. The German critic Franz Roz introduced the concept of Magic realism in 1920 and it was first used in paintings. The term was introduced in the book Post-expressionism, Magic Realism: Problem of the Most Recent European Paintings in 1925. The purpose here is to analyze the elements of magic realism in the novel, Beloved. We can see supernatural elements in Sethe’s house that bring chaos by haunting everyone through its mysterious presence, and making Sethe’s both the sons Howard and Buglar run away. It appears to be the ghost of a baby which was murdered by Sethe. The ghost causes the things in the house to break and shake mysteriously. In magic realism fiction the ghosts are the central characters generally. In the novel Beloved Morrison has portrayed the ghost as a living person. Thus, the dominance of a unique, mystical and gloomy atmosphere can be seen throughout the novel.