Transforming borders
resistant liminality in beloved, song of Solomon, and Paradise
pp. 105-122
in: Jessica Elbert Decker, Dylan Winchock (eds), Borderlands and liminal subjects, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
This essay investigates liminality as a space and state of resistance in Toni Morrison's novels. Racial marginalization in America is symptomatic of a hierarchical and supremacist power system that privileges a dominant culture of whiteness. Morrison suggests that the liminal position of people of color is potentially empowering in that her characters' actions denaturalize the racial border, revealing its artifice. This racial border manifests itself throughout the oppressive geography of her novels; marginalized characters transform these places into spaces of resistance through acts of transformations, redefinition, and naming. Doing so reveals instead of a concrete line between races, a borderland in which both sides of the binary change in relation to one another.