ABSTRACT
Will Cunningham examines the liminal spaces of Toni Morrison’s celebrated novel in “Contesting Boundaries in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Morrison dedicates Beloved to the “Sixty Million and more” captured, displaced, and murdered Africans whose physical lives and cultural identity were terminated amidst the transatlantic slave trade. In Cunningham’s reading, Morrison’s invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the story of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence, a complex, industrial, and capitalistic endeavour that specifically targeted black identity. The hold of the slave ship could be viewed as a precursor to more familiar, albeit less violent, modern spaces that might be demarcated as placeless: international airport terminals and borders, refugee camps, and military detention prisons. As Cunningham reads them, these locations all occupy that liminal space between opposing binaries; this space is the “third-space,” the borderland, the indefinable, a temporary and fluctuating zone governed by both regulatory and lawless forces. But such a place is never a totally abstracted, passive, or static locus. Even where identity is uprooted, the processes of re-visioning and remembering invoke the spatiality of the borderland. This tension between a space created by the material manifestations of power and the performances of identity within and through these movements of capital reveals an acute, revelatory convergence of spatial and racial identity formation. Cunningham argues that reading the confluence of space and race allows us to see in Morrison’s work a critical mass of dispossessed humanity embroiled in constant relations of subversion and contestation.
