“침묵을 강요당했던 ‘빌러비드들’”의 다문화 사회에서의 의미

The Signification of Silenced “Beloveds” in the Multicultural Society: with Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the center

In Beloved, Toni Morrison strives to have the silenced voices of ex-slaves heard. In this novel, personal stories and experiences of characters interfere in the official history of slavery. Sethe articulates the experiences of slavery through the omission from U. S. history of those silenced voices of slavery. Throughout Beloved, diverse voices concerning sexually and economically abused slaves are re-presented and re-created through the reincarnated Beloved, whose meanings become ambivalent. As the novel progresses, Morrison's critical tone about the violent structure of slavery becomes poignant as characters’ discursive interactions come to be complicated, which deepens the signification of their slave experiences. Morrison's critique demonstrates that the dominant meaning systems, which are readily available to students and teachers, are ideologically stitched into the fabric of Western imperialism and patriarchy. Multiculturalists thus cast a critical gaze against the structure of monoculturalism and interpose the semantic movements of difference into the notion of ethnical, cultural, regional, and political identity, activating them in sociopolitical contexts. I argue that multiculturalism helps us build up the agency of an ethical responsibility of silenced voices, because it analyzes the way in which racial, sexual, cultural, and political differences have been exploited in colonialism but acknowledged in multicultural society.