Colonial Spatiality in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy


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Tabur Ş.

2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE, EDUCATION AND CULTURE (ICLEC), İstanbul, Turkey, 27 - 29 June 2019, pp.208

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Summary Text
  • City: İstanbul
  • Country: Turkey
  • Page Numbers: pp.208
  • Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

In an often-quoted sentence, Michel Foucault argues that “[a] whole history remains to be written of spaceswhich would at the same time be a history of powers [...] from the great strategies of geo-politics to the tiny tactics of the habitat” (149). Correspondingly, the proposed paper seeks to bring the perspective of space into the interrogation of European colonialism in the “New World” through a spatially oriented reading of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Through its wide spectrum of characters and narrative spaces, the novel investigates how racism and colonization were institutionalized through a wide range of spatial themes including “fluid land claims” (Morrison 10) displacements, (dis)possession, slavery, land owning, and (re)naming. Drawing on a trialectic understanding of space as theorized by Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, I will explore the physical, imagined and lived spaces of colonialism as represented in the novel. In so doing, I will briefly discuss John Locke’s theory of property as a discursive space which actively shaped the production of physical spaces and spatial practices in the New World. In addition to the physical and discursive production of colonial space, the ways in which the novel projects alternative, lived and contested spaces will be examined as well.