A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Racial Politics in Beloved : Toward the Reconstruction of the Self through “Rememory”

A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Racial Politics in Beloved : Toward the Reconstruction of the Self through “Rememory”

This paper examines the issues of racial oppression and self-recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved from a psycho-social perspective and explores the critical implications of Morrison’s use of narrative “rememory” as a way for African-Americans to reclaim and repossess their traumatic collective history. For the characters of the novel, rememory means critically revisiting their traumatic past and recreating their selves as the agents of their lives by recovering from the residual effects of slavery. The Reconstruction era as the setting of the novel also foregrounds the necessity for African-American former slaves to restitute their selfhood by establishing a critical distance from their past and freeing themselves from the psychic oppression and wounds caused by racism. Each character’s encounter with Beloved symptomatically testifies to the still lingering detrimental effects of slavery and the oppressive racial politics that continue to cause everyone to live defensively. Drawing on various psychoanalytic theories such as D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory and Heinz Kohut’s self psychology, as well as Jacques Lacan’s and Frantz Fanon’s views on self-alienation, this paper investigates the specific ways in which the racial politics of a white supremacist society operates and controls its subaltern subjects with its oppressive master narrative. This paper thus highlights that Beloved as a narrative rememory serves both oppositional and liberatory functions by exposing and countering the insidiously debilitating politics of race and by clearing a space for the self-recovery and self-restitution of the victims of traumatogenic injustice.