Abstract

This paper traces the various manifestations of the hunger/ingestion motif in Beloved and its implications at the psychological and diegetic levels, mapping out the connection between hunger and storytelling as a form of resistance. At a deeper level, however, the novel also evinces how the hunger/ingestion dialectics inform not only African Americans’ emotional and spiritual deprivation but also the diegetic in(di)gestion, disadjustments, and dis(re)memberment of their history and identity. By mapping out the fusion between the intra-diegetic and extradiegetic, this essay ultimately argues that Morrison’s transgressive re-reading/rewriting of the imperial archive of black history and identity essentially requires both “a visceral reliving of [its] trauma[s]” (Young 9) and a parodic o/aural and narratological reinscription of its predatory patterns.

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