Hush, Little Baby-Ghost: The Postcolonial Gothic and Haunting History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
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Abstract
The gothic and the postcolonial share common concerns of subversion and transgression; both aim to represent alternative experiences, worldviews, and different histories in literature. This essay discusses the interplay of the gothic and the postcolonial in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to address crises. It asserts that intertwining both genres enables the unspeakable to be spoken, and allows a silenced history of slavery to be heard. I argue that the past, in a crisis like situation, enforces itself into the present and that the past can be seen to haunt the present, thereby indicating Beloved’s symbolic representation of a silenced history and repressed traumatic memories. The essay claims that the story has to be told and the memories allowed to be relived in order to come to terms with the trauma of slavery and focuses on the importance of legitimization and narration.
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