RE-MEMORY AND THE HAUNTING OF SUBALTERN IDENTITY: A POSTCOLONIAL ANALYSIS OF TRAUMA, HISTORY, AND RESISTANCE IN BELOVED

Abstract

This study provides a critical analysis of Beloved by Toni Morrison as a conceptual tool of re-memory and postcolonial theory of trauma and subaltern identity formation in the sense of how historical memory as a storytelling tool and a mental process reconstructs the lived experience of slavery. The study examines the ways in which Morrison disrupts linear historiography by introducing memory as fragmented, spatial and constantly recurring, and, in this manner, turns the past into a dynamic element that shapes the identity and consciousness of the present. The study  uses a qualitative interpretive method to examine the way re-memory functions in the novel to articulate the collective trauma, retrieval of silenced pasts, and reconstruction of fragmented subaltern identities under the long-term effects of slavery. It also explores how the narrative strategies used by Morrison (nonlinear temporality, haunting, repetition, and symbolic embodiment) contest hegemonic colonial narratives and offer alternative ways of historical explanation based on lived experience, as opposed to archival recording. The results indicate that re-memory in Beloved is both a weight and a resistance mechanism, which allows the characters to face the oppressed past, as well as undergo psychological fragmentation and emotional discontinuity. The conclusion of the study is that the novel by Morrison is able to redefine the connection between memory, identity, and history by situating re-memory as an effective instrument of postcolonial resistance, ethical remembering and the recovery of subaltern voice within the literary narrative