•  
  •  
 

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Toni Morrison dedicates Beloved to the "Sixty Million and more" captured, displaced, and murdered Africans whose physical lives and cultural identity were terminated amidst the transatlantic slave trade. Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the story of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence - a complex, industrial and capitalistic endeavor that specifically targeted black identity. The belly of the slave ship, an image invoked in Beloved's monologue, is a precursor to more familiar, albeit less violent, modern spaces that might be demarcated as placeless: international airport terminals and borders, refugee camps, and military detention prisons. These locations all occupy that liminal space betwixt and between opposing binaries: this space is the borderland, the indefinable, a temporary and fluctuating zone governed by both regulatory and lawless forces. The slave ship was the first in a long line of spaces that the sixty million and more occupied. The plantation, the big house, the slave quarters, and the auction block were all locations where to varying degrees, as Katherine McKittrick notes, white hegemonic systems "situate black people and places outside modernity" (949). These were the locales where enslaved blacks were kept "in place" by virtue of legal and cultural placelessness. But space is never a totally abstracted, passive, or static loci - especially a borderland space. [1] Even amidst a landscape where identity is uprooted, the processes of re-visioning and remembering invoke the spatiality of the borderland, which simultaneously houses counter-hegemonic forms of agency. This tension between a space created by the material manifestations of power and the performances of identity within and through these movements of capital reveals an acute, revelatory convergence of spatial and racial identity formation.

Download

Share

COinS