The Space Between

Beschreibung
Established and cherished fantasies of the integrity of the American subject are based on the spatialized imaginary of being on this side of the frontier rather than on the other. Toni Morrison’s fiction challenges such dialectics by telling us of spaces between where the coexistence of paradoxes that seem irreconcilable must be tolerated. This study investigates Morrison’s affective and rhetorical enactment of ambivalence and how it defies binary oppositions, such as inside/outside, subject/object, and self/other. Morrison, this study suggests, proposes a paradigmatic shift that introduces new coordinates to conceive of an American discursive space traditionally exclusive of indigenous and African American presence in order to ultimately »draw a map […] without the mandate for conquest.«