Cultural Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Racial Violence and the Formation of Afro-American Identity

Abstract

Toni Morrison has explored Afro-American heritage which has intense impact on their psychology. In Post-Civil War, America, the status of the Afro-Americans started improving. They, however, carry the trauma of slavery even as their status has been improving day by day. Toni Morrison’s works capture this very trauma of slavery, which is not so much it, is cultural. Almost all her characters remember their traumatic experience which can integrate them together. Cultural trauma, in Morrison’s representation in major fictional works like Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Paradise and Sula, is meant for the formation of a new Afro-American identity out of the experience of the trauma of slavery. This dissertation explores Morrison’s treatment of the historical trauma. It concludes that Morrison’s representation is that of cultural trauma which tries to patch up the hole in the fabric of the Afro-American identity.