英文摘要 |
This article investigates the spatial politics in the margin as is dramatized in Beloved (1987). An on-going concern we find in African American writer Toni Morrison's works is the efforts on the part of African American community to reanchor themselves in cultural sites that have been taken away from them through slavery--bodies, land, home and community. Drawing upon Foucault, Massey, and Shields, I argue that the formation of place has its history and is ineluctably linked up with hegemony and capitalism. Spatial politics suggested by de Certeau, bell hooks, Pile and Keith, however, offer tactics and strategies for us to understand how people in the margin reclaim their lost 'grounds.' I show the ways in which black slave families are marginalized through the spatial division and regulation by white slavery system. Their spatial marginalization has become internalized to disrupt their process of social spatialization, which is crucial for the production of a sense of place. In circumstances where the hegemony of slavery is inescapable, their spatial politics lies in an act of reverse cartography along the social mappings that dehumanize their bodies, destroy their family, and wreck up their community. The matrilineal community headed by Sethe reclaims its captivated bodies through a decoding and recoding process that also serves as a focal point that brings the female characters together. She also brings aesthetic value into domestic labors, thereby resisting slavery's commodification of their labor; Paul D reconfirms his masculinity in humanist discourse by means of a tactical disguise that both conforms to and fights against the white surveillance. A sense of family can thus be restored with their humanized gender positions in place and the domestic place exorcized from both the slavery and the traumatic history embodied by Beloved. Finally, the community in the margin is resurrected through a joint effort by community figures like Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs who render the black community surrounding 124 Blue Stone Road a radical open space. |