The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12786958
AutoresAretha Phiri (0000-0002-1204-8779, Rhodes University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen21
Número1
Páginas69-84
Fecha de publicación2020-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSafundi (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1543-1304 • E-ISSN: 1753-3171
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17533171.2020.1698695
OpenAlexW2998291634
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas36

Demands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extends normative ideologies of reparations to include a critical engagement with existential reparation. This paper offers a literary exploration of the efficacy of reparations in overcoming legacies of racial discrimination and disadvantage. It argues further argues that Beloved and Country of My Skull’s creative representations of the tension between healing/repair and irreparable woundedness do not just engage chronic black ontological precarity; their narrative interrogation of (the possibility of) existential reparation problematizes (historically) conventional identitarian processes and advances morally responsive and socially transformative ways of being in the world

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Existentialism · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Redress · Sociology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture