Magical Realism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Magical realism as a dominant literary device can be contemplated as a decolonizing agent in a postcolonial context in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison’s use of narrative in Beloved takes the benefit of both realism and magic to challenge the assumptions of an authoritative colonist attitude and so can be alleged as a powerful and important method to exhibit the post-colonial experiences of African American ex-slaves in United States. It can also provide an alternative perspective to Eurocentric accounts of reality and history to attack the solidity of Eurocentric definitions and as a consequence to portray the silenced and unspoken voices of numerous enslaved generations of African American in the history of United States. The following study seeks to explore magical realism’s decolonizing role in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It is an attempt to trace the narrative and thematic approach of magical realism that highlight the novel as an essential text of post-colonial literature.
KEY WORDS: Magic Realism, …show more content…
In post-colonial terminology, the hegemonic discourse of the colonizer is reflected through realism and the elements of magic refers to the strategy of resistance and the struggle or battle used by colonized. Magical realism is used as a tool to fill in the gaps of cultural representation in a post-colonial context by recapturing the fragmented bits and voices of forgotten histories from the point of view of the colonized. The dose of magical realism in Beloved not only addresses historical issues critically in an attempt to cure the historical wounds which in turn reflects history but also it attempts to change it. Thus Beloved can be read as a postcolonial historiography intervention, a strategic re-location of history of America in the lives of the historically deprived African