| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系 === 95 === Bodies are always a central focus in African American Literature. This thesis aims to explore how Toni Morrison in Beloved represents black bodies that are dismembered by enslavement as the Other and inscribed by Western socio-political discourses; more importantly, how black bodies are also presented as a resistant terrain, empowering dynamic drives through translinguistic physical codes or bodily rhythms that are effectively subversive to the symbolic order of the West. Both delicately imposed by the cultural ideologies and concerned with the ethos of blackness, black bodies in the novel occupy a “liminal” state where past and present and time and space interchange through Morrison’s intertextual writing. Within the dialogue of social context and psychological transformation, black bodies are no longer the inscribed texts under the predomination of Western signifying systems but catalysts that trigger black people’s physical and spiritual wholeness.
In the introductory chapter, I explain my premise that the body engraved by the discourses of Western epistemology is a stagnant one while the female body, through the physical senses, supports a semiotic rebellion against the symbolic signs for African Americans. Chapter Two explicates how socio-political dialectics and Cartesian dualism objectify the body as other and, furthermore, how the white masters’ patriarchal authority degrades black flesh as a commodity exploited for reproduction in linear history. Specifically reading black bodies through the lens of psychoanalysis, chapter three reconsiders the body as the “semiotic chora” in Julia Kristeva’s sense. Contradictory drives in this space generate both destructive and constructive forces, in which nameless, amorphous and polyvalent status is analogous to poetic language that nullifies linguistic continuity and dismantles cultural hegemony. Return to the maternal body, therefore, becomes a ritual for each black person to reconstruct his subject-in-process through reintegrating with himself, with his mother and with his community. Morrison’s neo-slave narrative, combined with her trope of rememory and practice of intertextual writing, is the subject of chapter four. Beloved represents an infinite process for each black subject who perceives social confinement, embraces black cultural hybridity, and achieves complete integration with the black community.
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