Tony Morrison’s Beloved Reimagines the Body as an Archive, Advancing a Black Feminist Epistemology that Destabilizes Western Regimes of Evidence and Historical Truth
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63283/IRJ.04.01/04Keywords:
Toni Morrison, Beloved, Black Feminist Epistemology, Body as Archive, Embodied Memory, Trauma Studies, Memory Studies, Archival Theory, Poststructuralism, Slavery Narratives, Oral Tradition, SpectralityAbstract
This research develops an extended critical investigation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), advancing the argument that the novel reconfigures the human body as a living archive that stores, transmits, and contests historical knowledge. In doing so, Morrison constructs a Black feminist epistemology that destabilizes dominant Western regimes of evidence, objectivity, and historiographical authority. Rather than privileging written documentation, linear temporality, and institutional archives, Beloved foregrounds embodied memory, affect, oral storytelling, and spectral return as legitimate and necessary forms of knowledge production. The study situates Morrison’s work at the intersection of Black feminist theory, trauma studies, memory studies, and poststructuralist archival theory. It examines how the novel critiques the epistemic violence embedded within traditional archives systems that historically excluded enslaved Black subjects and proposes alternative epistemologies rooted in lived experience. Through close textual analysis, the research explores how bodily scars, fragmented narrative structures, and haunting disrupt conventional understandings of truth. By conceptualizing the body as archive, Morrison not only recovers suppressed histories of slavery but also redefines the criteria by which knowledge is validated. This project contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship by demonstrating how literature can function as both an archive and a methodological intervention in historical discourse.
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