Made the absence shout’
Paradox as iconoclasm in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9287103 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brendon K Vayo (Houston Community College System, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 19-36 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Literary Semantics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0341-7638 • E-ISSN: 1613-3838 |
| Publisher | De Gruyter Mouton (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/jls-2022-2048 |
| OpenAlex | W4225340190 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 14 |
In 1856, Margaret Garner murdered one child, and attempted to murder three others, rather than return them to slavery. Despite the impact traumas like Garner’s had on abolition, history largely forgets or ignores these gruesome details. In their place come racialist markers that obscure Garner’s likeness. Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s The Modern Medea , for example, depicts Garner with a head wrap and wild eyes. Visual cues such as these perpetuate an undifferentiating representation of Garner, categorized as something between asexual “mammy” and angry “slave.” I argue that Toni Morrison recovers Garner by reconfiguring what Hayden White terms the “historical account” with icons to connote paradoxical significations. Like paradoxes, these icons simultaneously embody complementary and yet oppositional significations without one privileged over the other. Morrison’s historiography thus produces in simultaneity a history told and repealed, which functions iconoclastically not only to engravings such as The Modern Medea but also to the linguistic system that structures an incomplete and surreptitious “historical account.”
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Historiography · Iconoclasm · Ideology · Linguistics · Literature · Object (grammar · Politics · Representation (politics · Simultaneity · Sociology · White (mutation · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |