The Reconstruction of Black History in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
Loading...
Date
2014
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
university Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
The following dissertation argues that the prominent concern of the contemporary African
writer Ayi Kwei Armah and the American Toni Morrison is the recuperation of lost,
misrepresented or occluded history of their communities. At the basis of the research is the
belief that a commonality of experience and interests can lead writers belonging to different
cultural backgrounds and disparate geographic areas to write in a similar way and share a
similar concern. Our special aim is to explain how Morrison and Armah in their respective
novels Beloved (1987) and Two Thousands Seasons (1973) reconstruct the history of their
communities by transgressing what is mapped out in the traditional historiography. To
achieve this aim, we resort to the New historicist theory, borrowing from the theoretical ideas
of the French thinker Michel Foucault in his acknowledged work The Archeology of
knowledge (1969) and his theoretical assumption of Counter-History (1970). Armah’s and
Morrison’s retelling of the history of their communities from that angle leads, as it is
portrayed in their novels, to a history which demarcates from the official one and seeks to
revise it at both form and content. Our dissertation centers mainly on the affinities that exist
between the two author’s endeavors, but we have also sorted out some points of divergence
concerning the authors’ use of the African oral tradition.
Description
62p.;30cm.(+cd)
Keywords
New Historicism, Michel Foucault, Literary Archeology, Dominant Discourse, Traditional Historiography, Counter-History, Ayi Kwei Armah, Toni Morrison, African Literature, American Literature, African Oral Tradition.
Citation
Comparative Literature