Toward the Inhuman: Mapping the Micropolitics of Minor Literature in Beloved

Abstract

This paper explores Toni Morrison’s most celebrated novel—Beloved, which, just like The White Hotel, (re)presents a historical trauma (slavery). I intend to take one step further beyond the existing scholarship by employing a Deleuzian (micro)politics of minor language/literature as well as a schizoanalysis (against Freudian psychoanalysis) of the deterritorialization of the main characters (the baby ghost excluded) in Beloved—Sethe, Paul D, and Denver (Sethe’s daughter). To be more specific, through exploring the main characters’ deterritorialization of slavery and its haunting shadow (the unspeakable horror and pain) in this novel, this paper aims to achieve a mapping (the Deleuzian term for a proper attitude of approaching the contingent realities) of a Deleuzian poetics/problematics of how to create a minoritarian language (Black English) for (re)presenting an extraordinary vision of the collective traumatic memory of extreme suffering, brutality, and inhumanity embodied in this exceptionally breathtaking novel.