Slavery And Loss Of Identity In Toni Morrison S Beloved

Introduction

"Identity" is one of the most hotly debated topics in literary theory and cultural studies. The language of “identity” is ubiquitous in contemporary social science, the ubiquity cutting across disciplines, from psychoanalysis through psychology, political science, sociology, and history. Common usage of the term, however, belies the considerable variability in both its conceptual meanings and its theoretical role. Restricting consideration to sociology and social psychology, variation is still considerable.Three relatively distinct usages exist. Some use the term to refer essentially to the culture of a people, indeed drawing no distinction between identity and, for example, ethnicity thus obscuring the theoretical point of its introduction. Some use it to refer to common identification with a collectivity or social category as in Social Identity Theory (Tajfel 1982) or in contemporary work on social movements creating a common culture among participants (Snow and Oliver 1995). Finally, some use it, as we do in the work underlying this paper, with reference to parts of a self composed of the meanings attached by persons to the multiple roles they typically play in highly differentiated contemporary societies. Several closely related practical and theoretical questions concerning identity emerge from current debates about cultural diversity. ”If multiculturalism is to be a goal of educational and political institutions, we need a workable notion of how a social group is unified by a common culture as well as the ability to identify genuine cultural differences (and similarities) across groups’’. Whether cultures are inherited or consciously and deliberately created, basic problems of definition – who belongs where or with whom, who belongs and who doesn't – are unavoidable the moment we translate our dreams of diversity into social visions and agendas. Debates about minority literatures, for instance, often get bogged down in tedious disputes over genuineness or authenticity, but it is difficult to eliminate these disputes entirely. That is because they point to what is in many cases a practical problem: who can be trusted to represent the real interests of the group without fear of betrayal or misrepresentation? Every "obvious" answer (such as "it'll have to be one of us, of course!") begs the question, indicating why our views about cultural identity always involve theoretical presuppositions. The most basic questions about identity call for a more general reexamination of the relation between personal experience and public meanings – subjective choices and evaluations, on the one hand, and objective social location, on the other. As Michael Hogg and Deborah J. Terry begin their analysis of the problem of identity as a perspective of on the dynamic mediation of the socially constructed self between individual behavior and social structure, we can claim that social identity theory and identity theory are two perpectives on the social basis of the self-concept and on the nature of normative behavior. Identity theory explains social behavior in terms of reciprocal relations between self and society. It is strongly associated with the symbolic interactionist view that society affects social behavior through its influence on self(Mead 1934 and also see Blumer 1969), and was developed in part in order to translate the central tenets of symbolic interactionism into an empirically testable set of propositions(Stryker 1980). Identity theory rejects the symbolict interactionist view of society as a relatively undifferentiated, cooperative whole, arguing instead

In the West, views about the nature of the self and of personal identity first surfaced in ancient Greece. But at that time, so far as we know, there was no sustained, continuing discussion of these issues. That is, there is no record of theorists explaining what they did and did not like about earlier proposals and then suggesting new alternatives to better deal with outstanding issues. Rather, different theorists made proposals on a variety of related issues, for the most part without explicitly discussing what their predecessors had to say or why they themselves did or did not take a different view. For instance, in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates discusses self and personal identity in connection with his inquiry into the possibility of survival of bodily death, but when Aristotle made a radically different proposal for how the soul should be understood, he did so without directly discussing Socrates’ (or Plato’s) view.

Greek thinkers came up with three sorts of answers to this question. One was that there is a changeless realm, like the ideal realm of geometrical objects, which is beyond the ever-changing material world and that one’s essential self—one’s psyche (or, soul)—resides in this changeless realm and thereby ensures one’s personal immortality. This answer, due to Plato and subsequently endorsed by Christianity, would inspire countless generations of Western thinkers. Another answer, due to Aristotle, was that there is a changeless dimension within every material object, which allows material objects, including human beings, to remain the same in spite of changing but which may not ensure one’s personal immortality. Finally, the materialistic atomists, a third tradition of Greek thinkers, argued that both change and stability in material objects are the product of changeless, material atoms coming together and pulling apart. These thinkers reasoned that often more or less long-lasting configurations of atoms are named and, hence, become available to be known. People, or at least their material bodies, the atomists reasoned, are temporary configurations of this sort.The question of which of these three theories best accounts for personal identity, or even for bodily identity, fueled subsequent personal-identity theory. So it is not surprising that recent theoretical writings on cultural identity have focused on the status of our personal experiences, examining the claims to representativeness we might make on their behalf. The two dominant alternative views on cultural identity – the view associated with identity politics and characterized as essentialism and the position of postmodernism – are in fact seen as providing conflicting definitions of identity because they understand the relation between the experiences of social actors and the theoretical construct we call "their identity" very differently. Simply put, the essentialist view would be that the identity common to members of a social group is stable and more or less unchanging, since it is based on the experiences they share. Opponents of essentialism often find this view seriously misleading, since it ignores historical changes and glosses over internal differences within a group by privileging only the experiences that are common to everyone. Postmodernists, in particular, insist that identities are fabricated and constructed rather than self-evidently deduced from experience, since – they claim – experience cannot be a source of objective knowledge.1 My central task here is to show, first, that the relation between experience and identity is a genuine philosophical or theoretical issue, and, second, that there is a better way to think about identity than might be suggested by the alternatives provided by the essentialists and the postmodernists.

The analysis of Toni Morrison's remarkable novel, Beloved, is directly concerned with the relations among personal experience, social meanings, and cultural identities. These complexities are at the heart of Toni Morrison's postcolonial cultural project in her remarkable novel, Beloved.” As Satya Mohanty considers, ’’central to the novel is a vision of the continuity between experience and identity, a vision only partly articulated in the juxtaposition of the dedication ("Sixty Million and more"), with its claim to establish kinship with the unnamed and unremembered who perished in the infamous Middle Passage, together with the epigraph's audacious appropriation of God's voice from Hosea, quoted by Paul in Romans, chapter 9: "I will call them my people, / which were not my people; / and her beloved, / which was not beloved." Laying claim to a past often serves simply to create an ancestry for oneself.’’ What makes this juxtaposition of allusions in Beloved especially significant is that it suggests how the claim is going to be spelled out later in the novel, the terms in which one's relationship with the past is going to be conceived. The community sought in Beloved involves as its essence a moral and imaginative expansion of oneself, in particular one's capacity to experience. Only in the context of this expanded capacity can we understand the trajectory of the moral debate that informs and organizes the narrative: the debate between Paul D and Sethe about the nature and limits of Sethe's "mother-love." Dehumanization is a central theme throughout the novel.

Chapter I

Identity and the Self

Identity is ‘the best device I know for bringing together

“public issues” and “private troubles”.

(Jenkins, 1996)

Identity Theory and the loss of the Self

The fact that the term ‘identity’ is used in different ways is not, however, only because of its being a modern cultural buzzword. Erik H. Erikson is largely responsible for the increased scientific and general popularity of the identity concept in the latter half of the twentieth century. He was one of the first to investigate the incisive significance of identity processes in social reality. However, the way he uses the identity concept is not always very clear and sometimes invites misunderstanding (e.g. Bosma & Graafsma, 1982). An example is an article in which Erikson (1966) examined the identity concept in race relations. In the article, in the same passage, identity, taken by Erikson to mean specifically the very essence of a person, is applied both to Freud’s Jewishness and to the heightened consciousness of himself as a unique person that William James once had in a rare moment of ecstatic, oceanic experience. Erikson (1966, pp. 147–148; his italics) tells us how James had written to his wife about this experience, ‘at such moments [of feeling most deeply and intensively active and alive] there is a voice insidewhich speaks and says: “This is the real me!”. He also tells us how Freud had said,in an address to a Zionist society in Vienna in 1926, ‘What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride . . . [but] . . . many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of acommon mental construction.’ Erikson concluded that this was, ‘a statement of that unity of personal and cultural identity which is rooted in an ancient people’s fate’. Hence, in the one case, the essence of personal self is held to be one’s membership of a social category or ethnic/religious group; that is, being like a number of other people. In the other case, it is the most individual sensation of a person’s unique sense of self; that is, being utterly unlike anyone or anything else. Using the concept in these two different ways is not very helpful and invites misunderstanding. James thinks the self is not the base from which all else rebounds but is fragmentary.

The components which make it up he calls the material self, the social self, the spiritual self, and the pure ego. The material self is not simply the body but a man's closest possessions and relatives. One's family turns out to be a component of self; certainly when a close one dies one feels as if they have lost a part of themselves. One's property and wealth contribute to one's material self as do lifelong endeavors. As James mentions: "There are few men who would not feel personally ersonally annihilated if a life-long construction of their hands or brains-say an entomological collection or an extensive work in manuscript-were suddenly swept away." As is evident, even something so ostensibly solid as one's material self is composed of numerous elements.

On equal par with one's material self is one's social self. Here James pays heed to man as a social being, an idea that has often escaped recognition. Through thought experiment, James concludes that the worst punishment imaginable would be a complete ostracision from one's fellows. Losing one's nature as a being-for-others can be more of a condemnation than any imprisonment. The social self, as one might expect from James, is no simple entity but: "Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind."

1.1.The concept of ’’identity”

Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity and the notion of vague identity. While the term ‘identity’ has acquired great suggestive power, it must still be asked whether the use of the concept is helpful in understanding social reality. Weigert(1986, p. 29) note that identity has become an indispensable analytic term, but also a cultural buzzword. They conclude, ‘The widespread acceptance of the concept of identity does not imply agreement on or even a clear understanding of its various meanings.’ Brubaker and Cooper (2000, p. 1) argue that identity ‘tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity)’. And Bendle (2002, p. 1) concludes that ‘accounts of identity are inconsistent, under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required’. Identity salience is defined as the probability that an identity will be invoked across a variety of situations, or, alternatively, as the differential probability across persons that an identity will be invoked in a given situation. Borrowing from cognitive social psychology (Markus 1977), identities are understood as cognitive schema—internally stored information and meanings serving as frameworks for interpreting experience. As such, they are cognitive bases for defining situations, and they make for greater sensitivity and receptivity to certain cues for behavior. With self thus specified, Identity Theory hypothesized that the higher the salience of an identity relative to other identities incorporated into the self, the higher the probability of behavioral choices in accord with the expectations attached to that identity. Furthermore, while in social psychology a large mass of empirical work has been devoted to its causes and consequences, the concept of social identity per se has traditionally received relatively little attention. The reputation of ‘identity’ as a cultural buzzword is not surprising. As Gleason’s statement indicates, popularly the meaning of the word seems self- evident, but it becomes quite elusive as soon as one starts to think about it. At first, the meaning of the term seems simply to refer to who you are. But what is meant by that pinpointing essence, ‘who you are’? As Gleason argues, very quickly all certainty evaporates, and the disagreements about what the defining characteristics may or may not be proliferate. As soon as the popularity of a term increases, conceptual inflation seems inevitable. This is also the case for ‘identity’.

Nowadays, identity seems to be everywhere; as a consequence, it is nowhere. Its overuse leads to confusion, misunderstanding, and conceptual vagueness which makes the term lose its analytic purchase. The result is an undifferentiated vocabulary that is used in many different ways. For example, the identity concept is used in a descriptive, an explanatory, and a normative sense. Identity is also used in a normative sense. ‘Having an identity’ is considered good and desirable, whereas the situation of ‘no identity’ is evaluated negatively. Everyone has the right to his or her own identity, whatever this means. Especiallythe discussion on the politics of identity gives the concept a normative and moralvalue. In this discussion, identities are seen as historical and political constructionsin which power differences play a decisive role. Ethnic minority groups claim the right to be different and to define who and what they are, or want to be themselves. Identity has become a legitimate topic in human rights and democracy discourses. This politicizing of identity emphasizes the unstable, contingent, and dominating aspects of identity. Identities are seen as subject to struggles and changing power relations, interests, and positions. Ethnic and cultural identitiesshould be recognized and respected, particularly when they are denied or repressed by others.

The notion of ‘’essential identities” – unity and persistence of objects

The concept of essentialism originated in the work of Plato (428-348 B.C.) (Mayr, 1982). He argued that, for example, a triangle, no matter what the length of the sides or the combination of angles, always had the form of a triangle and thus was discontinuously different from a circle or rectangle. For Plato, the phenomena of the natural world were simply a reflection of a finite number of fixed and unchanging forms, or eide, as he called them. The eide were renamed essences by the Thomists of the Middle Ages. Constancy and discontinuity were the crucial properties of essences. That is, an essence does not change and is categorically different from another essence. The essentialists attributed continuous variation to the imperfect manifestation of the essences. Essentialism was the philosophical foundation for positivism in philosophy up to the twentieth century. Essentialism therefore dominated philosophical and scientific thought in the Western world. We will refer to this form of essentialism as classical essentialism.

Ironically for the purposes of the current discussion, Darwin was one of the first to reject essentialism, at least partially. His reward was rejection of his work by the philosophers of the time. His notion of change through evolution was fundamentally at odds with the notion of constancy in essentialism. Today, essentialism implies a belief that certain phenomena are natural, inevitable, universal, and biologically determined (Irvine, 1990). We will refer to this form of essentialism as modern essentialism. The term is often used loosely to refer to research and theory presuming a biological basis–usually a biological determination–of sexual behavior, although as we will see in a later section, there are also cultural essentialist theories. Interestingly, the term essentialism is generally used by those who are opposed to it, not by those who practice it. In the sections that follow, we will review theories and research that fit into this broad category, while at the same time considering whether these theories and research also conform to some "essential" properties of classical essentialism: (a) a belief in underlying true forms or essences; (b) a discontinuity between different forms rather than continuous variation; and (c) constancy, that is, the absence of change over time. First, we review evolutionary theories and then a set of theories and research on proximal biological causes of sexual phenomena. Finally, we consider the possibility of cultural essentialism.

Satya Mohanty’s realist view of identity resolves some of the limitations of essentialism by reconceiving experience as a source of knowledge. His objective is to argue that experience, properly interpreted, can yeld reliable and genbuine knowledge, just as it can point up instances and sources of real mystification. In his theory, experiences do not ground knowledge because ’’of their self-evidence authenticity but rather they provide some of the raw material with which we construct identities’’.

According to Russell, the essential identity is often given by the persistence of matter. The Essential Identity is the capacity of the self to recognize itself without reference to any experience of the past, or any self-image, or even any memory. We recognize ourselves because we are present as ourselves, as the Presence which is authentically ourselves. This pure, unmediated self-recognition is innate, inherent in the self, but it is available only when the self ceases to identify with the content of experience, and thus allows the Essential Identity to arise. From this point of view, we can assume two perspectives for the disussion about essential identities: continuity and persistence of objects. Our concept of the persistence of matter is relatively theoretical as compared to our concept of the observable persistence of an ordinary articulatedobject, and that, as a consequence of this fact, we should be ableto imagine what it would be like to live in a world in which we had a commonsense use for the latter concept but not the former. A somewhat different and perhaps easier point, which reinforces the previous one, is that we can imagine what it would be like for our concept of the persistence of ordinary objects to function normally while the concept of the persistence of matter is repudiated at the highest theoretical levels. (This is, I think, tantamount to imagining a world in which ordinary objects in fact persist without any matter in fact persisting.) It certainly seems that scientists might tell us that there is no such thing as an underlying level of persisting matter, but that some radically different conception affords the ultimate explanation of physical phenomena. (Indeed on some readings of contemporary physics it may possibly be that scientists have told us this.) But this would not (and should not) prevent us from continuing to judge in the normal way about the identity of ordinary observable object. It follows from the above account that I would regard our concept of the persistence of ordinary articulated objects as decisively more primary than our concept of persisting matter. This implies a repudiation of the common procedure (e.g., in Locke's discussions of identity) of stating identity criteria for ordinary objects in terms of a prior notion of persisting matter.

Often this procedure will take the form of substituting for the requirement of spatio-temporal and qualitative continuity the requirement that an object's material composition can alter only gradually. Now these requirements do in practice amount to virtually the same thing, but it is nevertheless a major error of principle to inject the concept of persisting matter into the very center of our ordinary identity criteria. The clear and observational concept of the persistence of an ordinary object deserves to be kept relatively disentangled from the more difficult and theoretical concept of persisting matter. We have, and have the right to have, a concept of persistence which operates essentially at the most straightforward observable level without much concern for what may be happening in the theoretical depths.

This is not necessarily to rule out the possibility that our relatively theoretical judgments about matter might marginally influence our judgments about ordinary objects. Such influence may be present in the following sort of case. Suppose that after breaking a table to pieces I manage to glue the fragments back together into a table. I should then probably want to say that it was the same table again, basing myself presumably on the judgment that "it's still the same matter." If this is correct then we have here a counterexample to the overall sortal analysis, insofar as we regard this analysis as implying that the identity of a standard object must be determined either by the observable sortal-covered continuity of the object, or by the observable sortal-covered continuity of the (major) parts that compose the object. In the present case the judgment about the identity of the table would be based neither on the sortal-covered continuity of the table, nor on compositional considerations about the observable sortal-covered continuity of parts of the table. It seems that we perhaps need to relax the compositional criterion by allowing into play theoretical compositional considerations vis-a-vis the identity of matter.

Ethnic essentialism and discrimination

Many authors have argued that essentialist group beliefs are central to racism (e.g. Brah, 1992; Hirschfeld, 1996; Jones, 1997; Mason, 1994; Solomos & Back, 1994). In different forms of racism, racial and ethnic categories are presented as natural, inevitable, and therefore unchangeable. These categories are taken to represent human types, specifying that an individual is fundamentally a certain sort of person. Racism attempts to fix social groups in terms of essential, quasi- natural properties of belonging within particular political and social contexts. Certain traits of mind, character, and temperament are considered to be an intrinsic part of an ethnic or racial group’s ‘nature’ and hence to define its ethnic or racial fate. Blum (2002, p. 134) describes the belief in cultural inherentism as follows: ‘These people (Jews, whites, Asians) just are that way (stringy, racist, studious); it’s part of their culture.’ And studies on ‘new’ or ‘cultural racism’ have shown that the idea of fundamental and inherent cultural differences is used to exclude and abnormalize ethnic minority groups (e.g. Barker, 1981; Hopkins et al., 1997; Rapley, 1998; Taguieff, 1988; Wieviorka, 1995).

A critique of essentialism lies at the heart of critical social theories and discourse analyses of racism and ethnocentrism. In particular, critical discourse analyses of racism have shown how various linguistic devices and discursive constructions are used to essentialize, legitimize and dissiminate patterns of social power and racial dominance (e.g. Brown, 1999; Essed, 1991; Rapley, 1998; van Dijk, 1987; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). Problems of racism are understood to be problems of essentialism, and the concepts of race, ethnicity, and culture have become suspect as essentializing categories. Theories that claim invariable and fundamental differences between social groups are defined as in need of deconstruction. Similar analyses are presented in mainstream social psychological studies of essentialism. Here the focus is on lay theories or concepts which posit that category members have a property or attribute (essence) that determines their identity. Yzerbyt(1997) argue that essentialist explanations best account for the way things are or justify the existing social system. They emphasize the role of essentialist beliefs in stereotypes and argue that these beliefs serve to rationalize existing social arrangements or the status quo (Jost & Banaji, 1994).

Ethnic identity and social interaction

The notion of identity forms a link between the individual and society. This easily evokes a choice for the one or the other: that society determines the individual or that the individual constitutes society via its own meaningful actions. In the first case, the starting point is a rather deterministic image of humans, in which the moulding of people is emphasized. In the second, the starting point is a voluntary-like image of humans, in which the autonomy of people is stressed. The choice of the starting point has important consequences for research on ethnic identity. In approaches that take society as their starting point, sociocultural circumstances and structures are central. People’s characteristics are considered the result of the situations and positions in which they find themselves. The social environment determines or at least structures what people do, feel, and think.

Ethnic identity is then studied at the societal and social level, in terms of economic, political, cultural, and ideological factors. For example, people are viewed as bearers of their culture, so that those who belong to one culture differ from those who are part of another. The result is a society with different cultural groups that determine what people are and how they act. Or people are seen as the passive recipients of imposed or assigned identities whereby the sense of ethnic identity is structured by the dominant discourses, meanings, and images that are attributed to the wider society. In approaches that start with the individual, the emphasis is on one’s own meanings and autonomous actions. Changes in society do not happen on their own, but are the outcomes of concrete actions and interactions. Ethnic identity is, then, considered to be the result of individual choices, personal meanings, and assertions.

The self-destructive quality of the violence associated with it appeared to undermine even the premise that ordinary selifshness normally restrains men from indulging their aggressive impulses in complete disregard of the interests of others or the fear of reprisals. The death-wish seemingly underlying the resurgence of mass murder, together with the failure of humanist traditions to anticipate or illuminate it, led to a growing conviction that "contemporary social theory, both capitalist and socialist, has nothing to say," as Norman O. Brown put it in Life against Death, about the "real problem of our age." Those who shared Brown's belief in the "superannuation of political categories" experimented, in the postwar period, with a variety of replacements. Some found in Christianity, specifically in "neo-orthodoxy," the basis for a new politics of "sin, cynicism, and despair," as Brown scornfully called it. Others proposed to replace politics with a new science of behavioral control, which envisioned the elimination of aggression by means of psychological conditioning and behavioral engineering. In efect, they held up a benign totalitarianism as the only answer to the savage totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler. Such a solution continues to appeal to many people, in spite of its undemocratic implications, because it retains important elements of the liberal worldview, as we have seen: a belief in the predictability of human "behavior," a pleasure-pain psychology, insistence on the primacy of self-interest. Behaviorism provides a reassuringly familiar intellectual setting for a brave new world.

Identity and politics

What is crucial about the “identity” of identity politics appears to be the experience of the subject, especially his or her experience of oppression and the possibility of a shared and more authentic or self-determined alternative. Thus identity politics rests on unifying claims about the meaning of politically laden experiences to diverse individuals. Sometimes the meaning attributed to a particular experience will diverge from that of its subject: thus, for example, the woman who struggles desperately to be attractive may think that she is simply trying to be a better person, rather than understanding her experience as part of the disciplining of female bodies in a patriarchal culture. Making sense of such disjunctions relies on notions such as false consciousness — the systematic mystification of the experience of the oppressed by the perspective of the dominant. Thus despite the disagreements of many defenders of identity political claims with Marxism and other radical political models, they share the view that individuals' perceptions of their own interests may be systematically distorted and must be somehow freed of their misperceptions by group-based transformation. Concern about this aspect of identity politics has crystallized around the transparency of experience to the oppressed, and the univocality of its interpretation. Experience is never, critics argue, simply epistemically available prior to interpretation (Scott 1992); rather it requires a theoretical framework — implicit or explicit — to give it meaning. Moreover, if experience is the origin of politics, then some critics worry that what Kruks (2001) calls “an epistemology of provenance” will become the norm: on this view, political perspectives gain legitimacy by virtue of their articulation by subjects of particular experiences. This, critics charge, closes off the possibility of critique of these perspectives by those who don't share the experience, which in turn inhibits political dialogue and coalition-building. A key condition of possibility for contemporary identity politics was institutionalized liberal democracy (Brown 1995). The citizen mobilizations that made democracy real also shaped and unified groups previously marginal to the polity, while extensions of formal rights invited expectations of material and symbolic equality. The perceived paucity of rewards offered by liberal capitalism, however, spurred forms of radical critique that sought to explain the persistence of oppression. At the most basic philosophical level, critics of liberalism suggested that liberal social ontology — the model of the nature of and relationship between subjects and collectives — was misguided. The social ontology of most liberal political theories consists of citizens conceptualized as essentially similar individuals, as for example in John Rawls' famous thought experiment using the “original position,” in which representatives of the citizenry are conceptually divested of all specific identities or affiliations in order to make rational decisions about the social contract (Rawls 1970). To the extent that group interests are represented in liberal polities, they tend to be understood as associational, forms of interest group pluralism whereby those sharing particular interests voluntarily join together to create a political lobby. Citizens are free to register their individual preferences (through voting, for example), or to aggregate themselves for the opportunity to lobby more systematically (e.g. by forming an association such as a neighborhood community league). These lobbies, however, are not defined by the identity of their members so much as by specific shared interests and goals, and when pressing their case the marginalized subjectivity of the group members is not itself called into question.

The Self and social interaction

Identity Theory traces its roots to the writings of George Herbert Mead (especially 1934) whose writings present a framework underwriting analyses of a host of sociological and social psychological issues. However, in themselves they do not present a testable theory of any issue, a condition assessed by many as due to the ambiguity of central concepts and the attendant difficulty of operationalizing those concepts (Meltzer 1972; Stryker 1980). Oversimplified, Mead’s framework asserted a formula: “Society shapes self shapes social behavior.” Identity Theory began by attempting to specify and render researchable the concepts of “society” and “self” in Mead’s frame and organize these as explanations of specified behaviors, which putative explanations could be tested in systematic empirical research (Stryker 1968).

This specification accepts the utility of Mead’s framework, but departs from Mead to adopt a view consistent with contemporary sociology’s imagery: society is seen as a mosaic of relatively durable patterned interactions and relationships, differentiated yet organized, embedded in an array of groups, organizations, communities, institutions, and intersected by crosscutting boundaries of class, ethnicity, age, gender, religion and more. Too, persons are seen as living their lives in relatively small and specialized networks of social relationships, doing so through roles that underwrite their participation in such networks. The embeddedness of patterned interactions and relationships implies a structural symbolic interactionist argument: the probability of entering into the concrete (and discrete) social networks in which persons live their lives is impacted by larger social structures in which those networks are embedded. That is, social structures outside given social networks act as boundaries affecting the probability of persons entering those networks. These considerations led to the initial Identity Theory specification of Mead’s formula. Mead’s “social behavior” becomes “role choice behavior.” The quintessential question the theory sought to answer is, given situations in which there exists behavioral options aligned with two (or more) sets of role expectations attached to two (or more) positions in networks of social relationships, why do persons choose one particular course of action (Stryker 1968; Stryker 1980)? Accepting Mead’s “self reflects society” dictum implies that the self is multifaceted, made up of interdependent and independent, mutually reinforcing and conflicting, parts.

2.1.Personal Identity

Personal identity deals with questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. Personal identity has been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. We often speak of one's “personal identity” as what makes one the person one is. Your identity in this sense consists roughly of what makes you unique as an individual and different from others. Or it is the way you see or define yourself, or the network of values and convictions that structure your life. This individual identity is a property (or set of properties). Presumably it is one you have only contingently: you might have had a different identity from the one you in fact have. It is also a property that you may have only temporarily: you could swap your current individual identity for a new one, or perhaps even get by without any. What is it to be a person? What is necessary, and what suffices, for something to count as a person, as opposed to a non-person? What have people got that non-people haven't got? This amounts more or less to asking for the definition of the word person. An answer would take the form “Necessarily, x is a person if and only if … x …”, with the blanks appropriately filled in. More specifically, we can ask at what point in one's development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. The ordinary distinction between "me" and "not-me," between that which does and that which does not lie within the boundaries of a single self, seems at least on first reflection com completely inevitable. It is difficult even to understand the suggestion that this distinction might be arbitrary, or that it might legitimately be redrawn in some other way. Here, if anywhere, a "conventionalist" attitude is likely to strike us as intuitively incredible. Even here, however, our intuitions can be seriously challenged; it is possible to argue that there is in fact nothing which constrains us to think of the identity of the self in the way we do. One rather direct way to broach this issue is actually to try to imagine what it would be like for people to operate with a conception of the self radically different from ours, and then to ask what, if anything, would be wrong with such a conception. Suppose that A is a person who throughout his entire life-history (as ordinarily conceived) makes physical contact with only the people B, C, D, . . . etc. Then in the new language the term "person" will denote an individual whose whole life-history consists of all the stages of A during periods when A is not touching another person, together with all the stages of B during periods when A is touching B, together with all the stages of C during periods when A is touching C, together with all the stages of D during periods when A is touching D, . . . etc. Crudely put, the idea is that in the new language it is a rule of "personal" identity that when two "people" come into physical contact, each takes over the physical and mental characteristics of the other, and then when they cease to be in contact they again exchange their physical and mental characteristics. (What happens if someone is simultaneously in contact with two or more people? Let us stipulate that this will not qualify as contact in the sense relevant to the rule of identity.) We imagine correlative changes in the use of personal pronouns, and in nouns subordinate to "person." For example, in the new language it would be correct to say: "A person must use the word 'I' to refer to that person." What is the practical importance of facts about our identity and persistence? Why should we care about it? Why does it matter? Imagine that surgeons are going to put your brain into my head and that neither of us has any choice about this. Will the resulting person—who will presumably think he is you—be responsible for my actions or for yours? (Or both?, Or neither?) Suppose he will be in terrible pain after the operation unless one of us pays a large sum in advance. If we were both entirely selfish, which of us would have a reason to pay? The answer may seem to turn entirely on whether the resulting person would be you or I. Only you can be responsible for your actions. The only one whose future welfare you cannot rationally ignore is yourself. You have a special, selfish interest in your own future and no one else's. Identity itself matters practically. But some deny this. They say that someone else could be responsible for your actions. You could have an entirely selfish reason to care about someone else's well-being for his own sake. Perhaps what gives me a reason to care about what happens to the man people will call by my name tomorrow is not that he is me, but that he is then psychologically continuous with me as I am now or because he relates to me in some other way that does not imply that he and I are one. If someone other than me were psychologically continuous tomorrow with me as I am now, he would have what matters to me, and I ought to transfer my selfish concern to him. Identity itself has no practical importance.

2.2.Social Identity

Social identity is about the relationship between the individual and the environment. Social identity refers to the question of what someone is taken to be socially (Stone, 1962). Hence, what is at stake is not that which distinguishes a person as an individual from other individuals, but that which is shared with others. The emphasis is not on what makes a person unique, but on similarities to some and differences from others. The social identity concept indicates what a person is, how she or he is socially defined. It is about categorical characteristics—such as gender, age, and ethnic background—that position or locate people in social space. These characteristics distinguish a person from people that do not have that characteristic and puts him or her together with those that do. Your identity as a member of an ethnic group, a particular culture, or one or the other sex is a designation placing you by what you, in a particular respect, simply are taken to be. Social identities involve social categories and designate the person’s position(s) in a social structure or social space that is larger and longer-lasting than any particular situation. Social identity ‘locates a person in social space by virtue of the relationships and memberships that it implies’ (Gecas & Burke, 1995, p. 42). This localization has led some scholars to reinterpret the traditional identity question, ‘Who or what am I?’, into the question, ‘Where am I?’ (e.g. Hall, 1996).To know the particular identity of a person means to know in which social category he or she fits. The membership of this category is the particular social identity. It indicates what a person is from a social perspective; one’s location or place in society (Simon, 1997). This is all there is to it, and, apparently, all there is in this respect to know. This does not say anything, however, about, for example, the cultural meanings of the categories and who is involved in defining the social categories, about the day-to-day negotiations and management of social identities, or about how one personally feels about a particular social identity.

2.3. Self-consciousness and social identity theory

Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, self-consciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth. A focus on embodied self-experience inevitably leads to a decisive widening of the discussion. The externality of embodiment puts me, and my actions, in the public sphere. Self-consciousness involves not only an ability to make reflective judgments about our own beliefs and desires but also includes a sense of embodied agency. I am, as Paul Ricoeur (1950, 56–57) points out, conscious of being the author of my actions, and this kind of awareness often comes about as my actions are reflected in the presence of others. I can become aware of myself through the eyes of other people, and this can happen in a number of different ways. Thus, embodiment brings intersubjectivity and sociality into the picture, and draws attention to the question of how certain forms of self-consciousness are intersubjectively mediated, and may depend on one's social relations to others. My awareness of myself as one person among others, an awareness that I may frame from the perspective of others, attempting to see myself as they see me, involves a change in the attitude of self-consciousness. Within this attitude, judgments that I make about myself are constrained by social expectations and cultural values. This kind of social self-consciousness is always contextualized, as I try to understand how I appear to others, both in the way I look, and in the meaning of my actions. I find myself in specific contexts, with specific capabilities and dispositions, habits and convictions, and I express myself in a way that is reflected off of others, in relevant (socially defined) roles through my language and my actions. This kind of self-consciousness is also the occasion for a self-alienation, famously explicated by Sartre in terms of the other's gaze. For Sartre, because “our being, along with its being-for-itself, is also for-others; the being which is revealed to the reflective consciousness is for-itself-for-others” (1956, 282). On this view, the primary experience of the other is not that I perceive her as some kind of object in which I must find a person, but I perceive the other as a subject who perceives me as an object. My experience of the other is at the same time an experience that involves my own self-consciousness, a self-consciousness in which I am pre-reflectively aware that I am an object for another. This experience can further motivate a reflective self-consciousness, as I consider how I must appear to the other. Merleau-Ponty (1945, 415) suggests that the other's gaze can motivate this kind of self-consciousness only if I already have a sense of my own visibility to the other. This sense of my own visibility, however, is immediately linked with the pre-reflective, proprioceptive-kinaesthetic sense of my body, an insight that goes back to Husserl's analysis (mentioned above), through Merleau-Ponty, who sees its connection to the infant's capability for imitation, and forward to more recent advances in developmental psychology (see Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 165, 404-405; 2010; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Zahavi 1999, 171–72). In effect, we find ourselves related to others through self-conscious experience that is motivated by the other's gaze.It is important to realize that self-consciousness is a multifaceted concept. It is not something that can be exhaustively analyzed simply by examining the inner workings of the mind.

Identity theory and the cooperative whole – moral responsibility

As noted earlier, Locke thought the personal identity relation was, in effect, an accountability relation: what makes Y at t2 the same person as X at t1 is just what makes Y accountable — morally responsible — for X's actions. And insofar as Locke thought personal identity consisted in something like direct connections of memory, he thus thought that Y is accountable for X's actions if and only if Y directly remembers those actions (presumably from the “inside”) (Locke 1694, 45, 51). Now on its face, this general account of moral responsibility won't do. After all, Y's identity with X will not always be sufficient for rendering Y accountable for X's actions, regardless of the theory of identity deployed. If X were a child, or were insane, or were brainwashed or hypnotized, say, then Y wouldn't be accountable for X's actions given that X wasn't a moral agent at the time of action, someone eligible for responsibility in the first place. What Locke must have meant instead is that personal identity is sufficient at most to render one eligible for moral responsibility. Is identity a necessary condition for responsibility, though? There is nearly universal agreement that it is. The way this idea is most often expressed is that one can be responsible only for one's own actions. Sometimes this is put more expansively: I can be responsible for my own actions, and I cannot be responsible for anyone else's actions. And these ways of putting the matter are just supposed to be a gloss on what is taken to be the platitude that moral responsibility presupposes personal identity. Now one might think that there are obvious counterexamples to this claim: parents are sometimes held responsible for the actions of their children, and accomplices are held responsible for the crimes committed by others. An easy reply, however, is that in each case the person being held responsible is actually responsible only for what he or she did. For example, the parent is being held responsible, not for what his child did, but for his (in)action in letting the child do what she did, say, or for his poor parenting. Or the accomplice is being held responsible, not for what the criminal did, but for what the accomplice did in aiding the criminal. So in both cases there is some properly specified action for which it seems only the person identical to the actor may be held responsible. Now ordinarily what grounds legal responsibility is something like a physical criterion of identity: as long as X and Y have the same DNA, then they are the same person, and so Y can justly be held responsible for the crimes of X. But it seems clear that these physical strands are merely contingent, albeit reliable, indicators of the identity-condition that actually matters, viz., some form of psychological relation. What we are looking for, after all, is really the same moral agent — a certain sort of robust psychological being — and given that, for us humans as presently constructed, sameness of moral agency goes hand in hand with sameness of DNA, identification of DNA patterns reliably tracks the responsible agent in question. But it is easy to see that, if DNA patterns changed over time, or if it were possible to alter them in a way that nevertheless preserved the relevant psychological relation, they would be about as useful indicators of responsibility as the color or length of one's hair.

What, though, is the appropriate psychology-based account of personal identity to target as the necessary condition for moral responsibility? What we are looking for is an answer to the following question: what makes a past action my own for purposes of responsibility? The answer given by most theorists on this topic is that an action is my own just in case I am identical to the person who performed it. The next question to pursue, then, is what account of personal identity provides the right criterion of what makes an action one's own? Locke's memory criterion once again won't work, for surely some actions can be one's own even if one no longer remembers performing them, due to drunkenness, repression, trauma, or the like (Schechtman 2005, 12; see also Bradford and Smith 1979). In addition, memory isn't sufficient for ownership of actions. Were someone else's memory trace of doing something immoral copied into my brain (so that I “remembered” that person's action), it would be silly to think that it was mine, that I was somehow thereby identical to the performer of that action (Schechtman 2005, 12).

The social role theory and the devalued role

Social reality is the product of human interactions, and social identities are socially produced and defined. Distinctions that people make and things that people do in everyday life can evolve into socially assigned identities. As people repeatedly engage in particular activities, they become typified as the sorts of persons that do those sorts of things or that simply are that way. Social distinctions and practices become objectified and institutionalized. Socially shared ideas and beliefs are created by people in interaction, but, once created, they have a seemingly autonomous life. They become the self-evident and taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of human beings and the social world.

“The Social Role may be defined as a socially expected pattern of behaviors, responsibilities, expectations and privileges” (Wolfensberger, 1992, p.13). People learn the expected responsibilities of a role through a “feedback loop between role expectations and role performances” (p. 13). Persons may enter into social roles through choice, because of their competencies or by imposition. Wolfensberger goes on to propose that different roles have different “bandwidths,” which he defines in terms of time (forinstance, the work role taking up 35 hours in a week and therefore being relatively important) and of location, occasion, and possibilities of manifestation. As an example, he points to the difference between the role of spouse, which is very broad and allows for many manifestations across many settings, and the role of customer, which is manifested in relatively fewerlocations. Bruce Biddle points out in his 1986 review article that social roles are one of the most popular ideas in sociology and one of the most popular ideas in the social sciences. “At least 10% of all articles currently published in sociological journals use the term role in a technical sense” (p. 67). Biddle, taking up a point made by a number of theorists (Rocheblave-Spenlé, 1962), goes on to suggest that role theory is the nexus between anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Other researchers and theorists (Eagly, 1987; Morgan & Schwalbe, 1990; Turner, 1988) also make the case that both sociology and social psychology are improved by their use of role theory. As we have seen, the social role concept seems to be well embedded in social science theorizing. Social role theory has engendered a great deal of theoretical work and seems to be of prime importance in explaining human behavior from the individual up and the social structure down. Thomas and Biddle (1966) concluded in their review that “Role concepts are not the lingua franca of the behavioral sciences, but perhaps they presently come closer to this universal language than any other vocabulary of behavioral science”.

As used by social scientists, roles are a fundamental tool of analysis that helps explain apparent regularities of behavior and the structure of social systems (Biddle, 1979, 1986; Newcomb, Turner, & Converse, 1975). Roles are thus an organizing concept of great usefulness. Role theory concerns one of the most important features of social life, characteristic behavior patterns or roles. It explains roles by presuming that persons are members of social position and hold expectations for their own behaviors and those of other persons” (Biddle, 1986, p. 67). Importantly, Biddle notes that role theory has led to very few derivations or utilizations. This is not to say that role theory has not been used in the past to generate possible practical utilizations. George Kelly (1955/1963) constructed his own social role theory and put it to use both as a diagnostic tool and as a therapeutic technique where people were called upon to script new roles for themselves. Jacob L. Moreno (Moreno, 1989) also developed his own version of role therapy and called it “psychodrama,” where the therapy included the acting out rather than reporting of problems by clients and other persons who were in role relationships with them. Roles are not only about perceived behaviors or position, but just as important, roles are about a person’s perception of a given situation and his self-conception within that situation. Roles are perceived by others and experienced by the incumbent. It is not surprising that the language of roles has a great deal of everydayness about it

Roles occur in everyday life, of course, and are of concern to those who perform them and others. Children are constantly enjoined to act in a more grown up fashion; new recruits into the armed services must learn roles of deference and deportment.” (Biddle, 1979, p. 57) “People who are devalued by their society get cast by their society into roles that are societally devalued. In other words, the person is given a role identity that confirms and justifies society’s ascription of low value or worth to the person” (Wolfensberger, 1992, p. 10). Though most of the debate concerning roles has occurred in relation to its purported fundamentality to valorization, the existing evidence supporting devaluation thesis could be of importance. There are three component parts to the role devaluation thesis. First, roles can be life defining, and when such roles are negative they can have devastating consequences for individuals. Second, some roles, including negative ones, have been systematically ascribed to groups or classes of individuals. Finally, many group roles are perpetuated by relatively robust stereotypes that shape the attendant attitudes of role incumbents and others in the socialenvironment.

Roles, groups and context

Some roles become so important in one’s life that the person plays this role even in settings that do not demand it, to the point that other people will view “a particular role as accurately revealing a person” (Turner, p. 6). Some roles become very defining of the person, especially in situations where a person might have access to very few roles. Thus, that Wolfensberger’s (1969) historical deviancy roles are life defining is at the very least plausible. As shown above, the client role (Wolfensberger & Thomas, 1994) can have a perverse influence in the lives of devalued individuals. From the perceiver’s perspective, this role person merger is particularly important when dealing with groups of people with whom the perceiver has very little direct experience.Identity Theory began with questions concerning the origins of differential salience of identities in persons’ self-structures and why identity salience may change over time (e.g., Stryker 1968; Wells and Stryker 1988). These questions led to the development of theory concerning ways people are tied into social structure and the consequences of these ties for their identities. The theory then asserted a link between identity salience and behaviors tied to roles underlying the identities, arguing that expectations attached to roles were internalized and acted out. This last link, later bolstered by conceptualizing identities as cognitive schema (Stryker and Serpe 1994) remained theoretically underdeveloped; there remained another side to the study of identities, one concerning the nature of identities and how they operate within the contexts in which they are held. The problem required a better understanding of the way in which identities produced behaviors expressive of the identities. The solution was based on the traditional symbolic interactionist ideas that identities are self-meanings and that self-meanings develop in the context of meanings of roles and counter-roles (Burke 1980; Burke and Tully 1977). Self-identity is an important dimension of social role. Another kind of conflict occurs when cultural norms strictly enforce gender roles that do not match gender identity. Resolution commonly includes finding ways around these prescriptions. In the family setting, the mother or father may reject aspects of their role assignment, as for instance, the father accepting the mother as being a better provider. An extreme resolution includes surgical intervention changing the body's morphology to conform to the self's gender identity, a medical procedure begun in Sweden. Self-identity conflicts arise when a person is unable or unwilling to fulfill societal norms or their partner's expectations. Societies often have a double standard or different sets of norms for females and males, with the female's behavior usually being more restricted.

From a symbolic interactionist perspective, behaviors can also be characterized as meaningful, and Burke and Reitzes (1981) proposed that the link between identity and behavior was through the meanings they shared. Using the semantic differential to measure college students’ identities and behaviors along the same dimensions, Burke and Reitzes (1981) found the link between identity andbehavior was in shared meaning: only when the meaning of the identity corresponded with the meaning of the behavior did identities predict behavior. For example, students’ self-view as sociable (one dimension of the student identity) did not predict college plans because they did not share meaning, while students’ self-views of academic responsibility(another dimension of the student identity) strongly predicted college plans.

For Identity Theory, the model is composed of four central components (Burke 1991): the identity standard, or the set of (culturally prescribed) meanings held by the individual defining their role identity in a situation; perceptions by the person of meanings within the situation matched to the dimensions of meaning in the identity standard; the comparator or mechanism that compares the perceived situational meanings with those held in the identity standard; and behavior or activity of the individual, which is a function of the difference between perceptions and standard. Behavior, in this model, is organized to change the situation and hence the perceived self-relevant meanings in order to bring them into agreement with those in the identity standard. Bringing situationally perceived self-relevant meanings into agreement with the identity standard is self-verification, accomplished through altering the present situation or seeking and creating new situations in which perceived self-relevant meanings match those of the identity standard. Groups and group membership derive their specific identity from a particularcontext, and approaches such as self-categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987) try to give a systematic account of the role of context. However, ethnicity cannot be examined only as a consequence of the way information is contextually processed. Ethnic identity can also be seen as a socially produced, contingent category. The focus can be on the legal, political, and societal definitions, practices, and conditions, and on the way ethnicity is used and lived by people in the context of everyday interactions. Specific forms of ethnic (self-)definitions can be explained not only by psychological tendencies and dispositions but also by political and cultural discourses and local discursive practices.

Taking the content of social categories seriously implies that the nature and meaning of ethnicity should be considered. Otherwise, ethnicity becomes similar to national, gender, religious, class, or whatever (artificial) social identity. To be sure, ethnic identity has many things in common with other social identities, but at the same time there is the question as to what is special about ethnic identity? What is predominantly offered in social psychology are theories of social categorization and intergroup relations, but ethnicity as such is not theorized. The question of what distinguishes ethnic identity from other social identities is, typically, not asked (Brown, 2000). People, however, have been found to make distinctions between different types of groups that affect normative expectations about in-group relations. Furthermore, there can be differences between social categories in terms of psychological investments and social and institutional ‘grounding’. In addition, an emphasis on processes has led to a focus on the more stable and clear categories that are often implicitly taken for granted (Reicher, 2001). Social psychologists as a whole are not much interested in the messier categories of human life and the ways in which these are socially defined and negotiated. The neat distinction between in- and out-group predominates, whereas, for example, in reality the number of hyphenated, or ‘in-between’, identities increases. Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Canadians, Turkish-Germans, Moroccan-Dutch, and Polish-Tatars are examples of groups reconstituting and negotiating their identities. These identity definitions take place in the context of histories, cultural differences, transnational migration, and (inter)national political debates and developments. These identities bring into sharp relief the sense of constantly managing and negotiating between tradition and modernity, past and present, local place and global space, and self and other.

Wolfensberger maintains that there are roles that aresystematically given to certain groups or classes of persons. There are, in fact, two parts to this argument, the first being that there are groups of individuals who hold similar positions, roles, beliefs, and attitudes thatmake them into identifiable groups and that these characteristics stand alone and apart from other visible physical characteristics. Second, certain roles are particularly reserved for these groups. This is Wolfensberger’s (1992) latrine worker argument, where immigrant populations are given the down-and-dirty jobs that none of the higher status classes are willing to take on. Alice Eagly (1987) suggests that the value of role theory lies in its capacity to describe parsimoniously the predictors of differences between groups of people, in her research on sex differences. According to this theory, the contemporaneous influences arising from adult social roles are more directly relevant to sex differences in adult social behavior than is prior socialization or biology. Social roles are regarded as the proximal predictors of adult sex differences, although these roles may be linked to other, more distal factors such as childhood socialization pressures and biological predispositions. Early on, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger in his discussion of sociology (1963) affirms that human behavior and beliefs are particularly predictable within classes or groupings. It is these predictable behaviors and beliefs which in part lead to the creation of stereotypes. Thus value systems, religious and political affiliations, and vocational occupations are primarily a function of class, and in a pluralistic society, class acts as the magnet around which all of these cluster. It is interesting to note that Berger (1996) also affirms tha in an upwardly mobile society, as the class of an ethnic group changes, so does its cluster of value systems, religious and political affiliations, and vocational occupations, thus the great unwashed—the eastern European Catholic immigrants who were the latrine cleaners of early 20th-century America—are now amongthe best educated and most upwardly mobile of its citizens.

Life defining roles

Some roles are so important that they are life defining. Thomas and Wolfensberger (1994) provided compelling arguments for the pervasive impact of the client role, especially on devalued individuals. Though the client role is open to all, it is expressed in valued ways for valued individuals (e.g., being the client of the stockbroker), but much less so when one is poor and thus very dependent for a very long period of time on a variety of human services. Thomas and Wolfensberger’s description of the career client role is in many ways reminiscent of Goffman’s (1961) description of the career of mental patient. Moreover, Wolfensberger argues that since for devalued persons, the client role is pervasive—it is the role that fills the most time—and that other roles are secondary and few in number, the client role becomes particularly defining, offering the individual fewer opportunities for learning skills associated with other roles and for being perceived as being able to learn the required skills for such roles. This argumentation is very similar to Eagly and Johnson’s (1990) discussion on the apparent sex differences in the behavior of organizational leaders, which are possibly the “product of the differing structural positions of the sexes within organizations” (p. 234). Like Thomas and Wolfensberger’s client role, the pervasive influence of gender roles was found throughout a series of secondary roles by Eagly and her colleagues especially in situations where the role demands were ambiguous and where the gender roles would be particularly important in informing the role occupant on how he or she should behave. These results were found in relation to helping behavior (Eagly & Crowley, 1986), leadership style (Eagly & Johnson, 1990), and aggression (Eagly & Steffen, 1986). The above supports the notion that, for instance, the client role is primary for individuals who have few other important roles that occupy as much time and are as salient to their self-concept. Thus, their client role can be life determining and will have a pervasive influence on the performance of other roles, especially in equivocal situations. Of particular interest to Wolfensberger’s hypothesis on the client role is Eagly and Crowley’s (1986) demonstration of the differences between the helping behaviors of men and women. As in the case of clienthood, the role of helper is open to all. But there are important differences between the helping behaviors and helping roles of men and those of women.

Social roles and stereotypes

It is observable that differences between groups and classe that lead to the formation of stereotypes. Early on, Donald Campbell (1967) argues that national stereotypes reflect the structural features of societies, e.g. agrarian versus industrialized. Eagly and Kite (1987) suggest that “the social roles that are available within a particular society shape the behaviour of the people, and this behavior provides the basic observations from which images of nationalities are derived” (p. 452). Though individual members of a given group might express these roles in a variety of idiosyncratic ways, other groups will hold quite simplistic stereotypes, especially from a distance when there is no real interaction. Thus, stereotypes can be more or less accurate depending on how much information one group holds on the other. As Campbell points out, “the more remote and less well-known the outgroup, the more purely projective the content of the stereotype and the less accurate it will be.” Eagly and Kite (1987) thus found that Americans were apt to believe that Iranians were particularly aggressive, proud, hostile, arrogant, and religious, though they had very little knowledge upon which to base these beliefs except for the regular newscasts of newsworthy events around the American Embassy hostage-taking incident (around 1979). “The inhabitants of these disliked countries were perceived as relatively unfriendly and unkind” (p. 461).

The important thing to note here is that stereotypes are primarily about two groups of individuals. The first group, the perceivers, hold the stereotypes to be true and these stereotypes are more or less accurate, depending on the amount of information available to the perceivers. The other group, the perceived, occupy roles and are involved in role performances that more or less accurately reflect the stereotypes held by the other group. In 1987, Alice Eagly and Mary Kite studied the stereotypes of nationalities as applied to both men and women. At the outset they observed that social roles are important because they determine the behaviors of group members, and observation of these behaviors are the basic data from which people form their images of groups of people. . . “Because racial groups in American society are differentiated on the basis of social class, with blacks more socio- economically disadvantaged than whites, people often interact across racial lines and roles that differ in power and privilege. As a consequence the content of beliefs about racial groups reflects the characteristic behaviors ascribed to differing social classes” (p. 451).

Moreover, differences in racial stereotypes are rendered even more complex by the stereotypes one holds concerning men and women. “People in the domestic role are thought to behave considerably more communally and less agentically than people in the employee role” (p. 452). In many cases the stereotypes are based on interaction at a distance rather than face-to-face interaction.

Stereotypes at a distance do not change very much and are mostly influenced by newsworthy events, where what is reported is the public behavior of the leadership or high- profile people of a nation. These, of course, would mostly be men, having, by and large, higher status and influence in most nationalities. Thus the stereotypes of nationalities are more similar to the stereotypes of the men than of the women of these nationalities. On the other hand, face-to-face interactions create situations where stereotypes are continuously under review with greater and more accurate information feeding the feedback system. Thus we can perceive certain immediate benefits of personal social integration that could have some beneficial impact on the stereotypes people have of handicapped individuals or handicapped groups. Eagly also observed that the types of roles that are available for observation in a given nationality are a function of these countries’ economies and social structures. Thus we can perceive differences between the roles available in industrial nations versus the roles that are available in countries whose economies are based on subsistence agriculture. Certainly these roles will have a dramatic impact on the national stereotypes as we perceive them.

Turner (1978) proposes that it is through roles that we get to know people. He goes on to suggest that an observer will, in some situations, “merge” the role and the person, in other words, observers will equate the person with the roles he plays, especially if there are really no other cues to knowing such a person. Perceptions of roles help us create the person; the setting he is in, the social positions he occupies, the behaviors that he exibits, the persons he interacts with: his role set. In this sense, Turner suggests that the personality of the person is the sum of his roles, that the personality of a person is in the eye of the beholder.

Roles and identities

When people respond to the open-ended question “who am I?”, they commonly include role descriptors as self- descriptors (Thoits, 1991). Role identities tell us who we are and give us guidance in terms of how to behave, thus providing us with “existential security” (Thoits,1983). Thus, Thoits, in her theoretical work, proposes that identity and self-conception are based on role positions, which come together in a hierarchical structureof salience. Researchers and theorists who study roles from the perspective of the perceived often refer to the concept as “role identity” or “identity” (Biddle, 1979; Deaux, 1993; Stryker, 1987; Thoits, 1983).

Role identities are self-conceptions in terms of one’s position in the social structure (e.g., “I am a father, husband, welder, union member, uncle . . .”). Specifically, role identities are viewed here as self- conceptions based on enduring, normative, reciprocal relationships with other people (Thoits, 1991, p. 103).

Kay Deaux (1993) suggests that there is so much overlap between the concepts of social identity (social role) and personal identity (role identity) that such distinctions are for all intents and purposes “arbitrary and misleading. . . Personal identity is defined, at least in part, by group memberships, and social categories are infused with personal meanings” (p. 5). A number of theorists have suggested that there is an important concordance between the roles a person has and who that person is. Peggy Thoits (1992) writes: In essence, identities are answers to the question “who am I?” in terms of the positions or roles that one holds (“I am a mother, a teacher, an aunt, a tennis player . . .”). Because identities define “who I am” they should be sources of existential meaning and purpose in life (pp. 236-237).

Property and identity

Property is a general term for rules governing access to and control of land and other material resources. Because these rules are disputed, both in regard to their general shape and in regard to their particular application, there are interesting philosophical issues about the justification of property. Modern philosophical discussions focus mostly on the issue of the justification of private property rights (as opposed to common or collective property). ‘Private property’ refers to a kind of system that allocates particular objects like pieces of land to particular individuals to use and manage as they please, to the exclusion of others (even others who have a greater need for the resources) and to the exclusion also of any detailed control by society. Though these exclusions make the idea of private property seem problematic, philosophers have often argued that it is necessary for the ethical development of the individual, or for the creation of a social environment in which people can prosper as free and responsible agents.

The ancient authors speculated about the relation between property and virtue, a natural subject for discussion since justifying private property raises serious questions about the legitimacy of self-interested activity. Plato (Republic, 462b-c) argued that collective ownership was necessary to promote common pursuit of the common interest, and to avoid the social divisiveness that would occur ‘when some grieve exceedingly and others rejoice at the same happenings.’ Aristotle responded by arguing that private ownership promotes virtues like prudence and responsibility: ‘[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1263a). Even altruism, said Aristotle, might be better promoted by focusing ethical attention on the way a person exercises his rights of private property rather than questioning the institution itself (ibid.). Aristotle also reflected on the relation between property and freedom, and the contribution that ownership makes to a person's being a free man and thus suitable for citizenship.

The Greeks took liberty to be a status defined by contrast with slavery, and for Aristotle, to be free was to belong to oneself, to be one's own man, whereas the slave was by nature the property of another. Self-possession was connected with having sufficient distance from one's desires to enable the practice of virtuous self-control. On this account, the natural slave was unfree because his reason could not prescribe a rule to his bodily appetites. Aristotle had no hesitation in extending this point beyond slavery to the conditions of ‘the meaner sort of workman.’ Obsessed with need, the poor are ‘too degraded’ to participate in politics like free men. ‘You could no more make a city out of paupers,’ wrote Aristotle, ‘than out of slaves’ (ibid., 1278a). They must be ruled like slaves, for otherwise their pressing and immediate needs will issue in envy and violence. Some of these themes have emerged more recently in civic republican theories, though modern theories of citizenship tend to begin with a sense of who should be citizens (all adult residents) and then proceed to argue that they should all have property, rather than using existing wealth as an independent criterion for the franchise (King and Waldron 1988). More than this, Aristotle states that “the politician and lawgiver is wholly occupied with the city-state, and the constitution is a certain way of organizing those who inhabit the city-state” (III.1.1274b36-8). His general theory of constitutions is set forth in Politics III. He begins with a definition of the citizen (politês), since the city-state is by nature a collective entity, a multitude of citizens. Citizens are distinguished from other inhabitants, such as resident aliens and slaves; and even children and seniors are not unqualified citizens (nor are most ordinary workers). After further analysis he defines the citizen as a person who has the right (exousia) to participate in deliberative or judicial office (1275b18–21). In Athens, for example, citizens had the right to attend the assembly, the council, and other bodies, or to sit on juries. The Athenian system differed from a modern representative democracy in that the citizens were more directly involved in governing. Although full citizenship tended to be restricted in the Greek city-states (with women, slaves, foreigners, and some others excluded), the citizens were more deeply enfranchised than in modern representative democracies because they were more directly involved in governing. This is reflected in Aristotle's definition of the citizen (without qualification). Further, he defines the city-state (in the unqualified sense) as a multitude of such citizens which is adequate for a self-sufficient life (1275b20-21). He then adds that “the common advantage also brings them together insofar as they each attain the noble life. This is above all the end for all both in common and separately” (III.6.1278b19–24). Second, what are the different forms of rule by which one individual or group can rule over another? Aristotle distinguishes several types of rule, based on the nature of the soul of the ruler and of the subject. He first considers despotic rule, which is exemplified in the master-slave relationship. Aristotle thinks that this form of rule is justified in the case of natural slaves who (he asserts without evidence) lack a deliberative faculty and thus need a natural master to direct them. Although a natural slave allegedly benefits from having a master, despotic rule is still primarily for the sake of the master and only incidentally for the slave (III.6.1278b32–7). (Aristotle provides no argument for this: if some persons are congenitally incapable of self-governance, why should they not be ruled primarily for their own sakes?)

Still even if we concede that property is the product of social rules, and that normative thinking about the former must be preceded by normative thinking about the latter, there might be facts about the human condition or our agency as embodied beings that provide philosophical premises for an argument that property relations should be established in one way rather than another. Clearly, there is at least one material object with which a person does seem to have an intimate pre-legal relation that would bear some philosophical analysis—namely, that person's body. We are embodied beings and to a certain extent the use and control of our limbs, sensory organs etc. is indispensable for our agency. Were a person to be deprived of this control—were others to have the right to block or manipulate the movements of his physical body—then his agency would be truncated, and he would be incapable of using his powers of intention and action to make something he (and others) could regard as a life for himself. Some modern authors, following John Locke, have tried to think about this in terms of an idea of self-ownership.

What about the ownership relation itself? Is there any inherent philosophical interest in the nature of a person's relation to material resources? When someone says ‘X is mine’ and X is an action, we see interesting questions about intentionality, free-will, and responsibility, which philosophers will want to pursue. Or when someone says ‘X belongs to person P,’ and X is an event, memory, or experience, there are interesting questions about personal identity. But when X is an apple or a piece of land or an automobile, there does not appear to be any question of an inherent relation between X and P which might arouse our interest.

Mead – The “I” and the “Me”

One of Mead's most significant contributions to social psychology is his distinction between the “I” and the “Me.” It's worth emphasizing that while this distinction is utilized in sociological circles, it is grounded philosophically for Mead. His target, in part, is no less than the idea of the transcendental ego, especially in its Kantian incarnation. It is also important to note that the “I” and “Me” are functional distinctions for Mead, not metaphysical ones.

The self that arises in relationship to a specific generalized other is referred to as the “Me.” The “Me” is a cognitive object, which is only known retrospectively, that is, on reflection. When we act in habitual ways we are not typically self-conscious. We are engaged in actions at a non-reflective level. However, when we take the perspective of the generalized other, we are both “watching” and forming a self in relationship to the system of behaviors that constitute this generalized other. So, for example, if I am playing second base, I may reflect on my position as a second baseman, but to do so I have to be able to think of “myself” in relationship to the whole game, namely, the other actors and the “rules” of the game. We might refer to this cognitive object as my (second baseman) baseball self or “Me.” Perhaps a better example might be to think of the self in relationship to one's family of origin. In this situation, one views oneself from the perspective of the various sets of behaviors that constitute the family system.

To return to the baseball example, one may have a self, a “Me,” that corresponds to a particular position that one plays, which is nested within the game as an organized totality. This self, however, doesn't tell us how any particular play may be made. When a ball is grounded to a second baseman, how he or she reacts is not predetermined. He reacts, and how he reacts is always somewhat different from how he has reacted in the past. These reactions or actions of the individual, whether in response to others or self-initiated, fall within the “sphere” of the “I.” Every response that the “I” makes is somewhat novel. Its responses may differ only in small ways from previous responses, but they will never be absolutely the same. No catch in a ball game is ever identical to a previous catch. Mead declares that, “The ‘I’ gives the sense of freedom, of initiative. The situation is there for us to act in a self-conscious fashion. We are aware of ourselves, and of what the situation is, but exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the action takes place”. The “I” is both a “source” of spontaneity and creativity. For Mead, this is not a metaphysical assertion. The “I” is not a noumenal ego. It is a label for describing the actions of human beings. We do in fact react in different ways, and some of these ways are sufficiently original to be labeled creative.

Sociality is a key idea for Mead and it has implications for his sociology and social psychology. If we think of the “Me” as a system, then there are times when the “I” initiates new responses that may or may not be integrated into an existing “Me.” But if they come to be integrated, then there is a time betwixt and between the old and new “Me” system. What makes this all the more interesting is that at the level of human interactions we have a capacity for reflection. We can become aware of changes that are taking place and even anticipate new “Me's” that may come into being. We can even set up conditions to promote changes that we believe may transform us in certain ways. Or to put this in another light, new problems are bound to arise in the world, and because of our capacity for sociality, we can get some purchase on the courses of action available to us as we reflect on the novel problems confronting us. Of course, because the problems are novel means that we do not have ready solutions. However, the capacity to at times “stand” betwixt and between old and (possible) new orders, as we do between old and new social roles, provides us with some opportunity for anticipating alternatives and integrating new responses. As a matter of fact, Mead links moral development with our capacity for moving beyond old values, old selves, in order to integrate new values into our personalities when new situations call for them.

Conclusions

In building an Identity Theory is also required specification of the concept of “society.” The theory found that specification in the concept of “commitment.” Persons, as noted, tend to live their lives in relatively small, specialized networks of social relationships. Commitment refers to the degree persons’ relationships to others in their networks depends on having a particular identity and role, measurable by the costs of loosing meaningful relations to others should the identity be foregone. The theory hypothesized that the salience of an identity reflected commitment to the role relationships requiring that identity. We arrive at Identity Theory’s specification of Mead’s formula: commitment shapes identity salience shapes role choice behavior. The extent to which individuals define themselves as individuals or as group members depends heavily on the politics inherent within their organisational culture. An individual's behaviour and group cannot be predicted solely from their idiosyncratic characteristics but is also dependant on the social context which determines the belief structures they utilise. The social identity theory has been applied to every aspect of organisational psychology and is supported by both archival and experimental research.

Chapter II

Slavery and Identity

There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized.

(Orlando Patterson – Slavery and social death, 1940)

The connection between slavery and identity seems to be double-structured. There is one aspect that is concerned with the racial identity and the other one that regards the loss of the self through the alienation of social interaction and dehumanization. According to Burke, “the self originates in the mind of persons and is that which characterizes an individual’s consciousness of his or her own being or identity. The self has the ability to take itself as an object, to regard and evaluate itself, to take account of itself and plan accordingly, and to manipulate itself as an object in order to bring about future states.” From the moment when the social ties are disrupted, the self looses the essential attribute of identity: living in permanent interaction with the others agents. When the sameness of a person, the condition or fact that a person is itself and not something else, individuality, or personality is alienated, the social self, or status is compromised. The case of slavery is one of the most dramatic examples for illustrating this kind of process – the identity loss, but, on the other hand, the gain through time, of a racial identity, despite the alienation of personal identity, so we can follow the road from the destruction of personal identity to the cohesion of a collective identity. This can be introduced into the postmodernist view over the deconstruction of subject.

Slaves, property and political status

Slavery is the state of being in the absolute or arbitrary power of another. On Locke's definition of slavery there is only one rather remarkable way to become a legitimate slave. In order to do so one must be an unjust aggressor defeated in war. The just victor then has the option to either kill the aggressor or enslave them. Locke tells us that the state of slavery is the continuation of the state of war between a lawful conqueror and a captive, in which the conqueror delays to take the life of the captive, and instead makes use of him. This is a continued war because if conqueror and captive make some compact for obedience on the one side and limited power on the other, the state of slavery ceases. The reason that slavery ceases with the compact is that ”no man, can, by agreement pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a power over his own life.“ (II. 4, 24)

Legitimate slavery is an important concept in Locke's political philosophy largely because it tells us what the legitimate extant of despotic power is and defines and illuminates by contrast the nature of illegitimate slavery. Illegitimate slavery is that state in which someone possesses absolute or despotic power over someone else without just cause. Locke holds that it is this illegitimate state of slavery which absolute monarchs wish to impose upon their subjects. It is very likely for this reason that legitimate slavery is so narrowly defined. There have been a steady stream of articles over the last forty years arguing that given Locke's involvement with trade and colonial government, the theory of slavery in the Second Treatise was intended to justify the institutions and practices of Afro-American slavery. This seems quite unlikely. Had he intended to do so, Locke would have done much better with a vastly more inclusive definition of legitimate slavery than the one he gives. It is sometimes suggested that Locke's account of ”just war“ is so vague that it could easily be twisted to justify the institutions and practices of Afro-American slavery. This, however, is also not the case. In the Chapter ”Of Conquest“ Locke explicitly lists the limits of the legitimate power of conquerors. These limits on who can become a legitimate slave and what the powers of a just conqueror are ensure that this theory of conquest and slavery would condemn the institutions and practices of Afro-American slavery in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Slaves and ownership

Greek laws of property were, according to Douglas M. MacDowell, "simple and primitive by comparison with the elaborate property laws of Roman and later systems.” There was no linguistic distinction between ownership and possession among the Greeks although, in practice, they might have been aware of it. It is perhaps misleading to speak of the Greek property system as being more primitive since, ironically, from the viewpoint of modern Anglo-American common law, the less elaborated and more relativistic Greek system was actually closer to modern practice than was the Roman.The significant point about the Roman law of property, with its emphasis on absolute dominion in tangible things, was the fact that it fitted nicely with the realities of an economy of simple commodity production. As Otto Kahn-Freund observed in his introduction to Karl Renner's work:

,,The Roman dominium, the legal norm safeguarding to the individual the absolute unfettered control over a tangible thing, tallied precisely with the economic and social function of property. The conception of ownership was the mirror of a society in which wealth mainly consisted of tangible things, things which formed a functional unit … Legal and economic property coincided: The notion of ownership applied to, and was the corollary of, a functional microcosm, an universitas rerum.”

The notion of absolute property became pivotal in private law. It iconceptualized, reflected, and supported both production and power without the need for support from other areas of culture. Another quotation from Kahn-Freund expresses this well: "Property, then, the central institution of private law, fulfilled in the system of simple commodity production the functions of providing an order of goods, and, in part, an order of power. It did so without any essential aid from other institutions.” Above all, property and slavery are two concepts that evolve opposite to each other.

It seems not unreasonable to argue that slavery played a critical role in this development-that the Romans were led to elaborate (that is to say, make fictive) the laws of property to the degree that they did chiefly because of the problems posed by large-scale slavery in their midst. The laws of slavery, W. W. Buckland tells us, are "the most characteristic part of the most characteristic intellectual product of Rome." Furthermore, "there is scarcely a problem which can present itself, in any branch of law, the solution of which may not be affected by the fact that one of the parties to the transaction is a slave, and outside the region of procedure, there are few branches of the law in which the slave does not prominently appear.” The critical role of slavery in the development of Roman law is perfectly understandable in light of the major role of slaves in the economy. Slaves along with land were the major sources of wealth. Of the two, land was without doubt the more important; but slaves were the more flexible and problematic. The development of the Roman doctrine of absolute ownership presents us with a fascinating paradox. The Romans, whom we celebrate for their galistic innovations, in elaborating the doctrine of dominium or absolute ownership, were actually creating a legal fiction and thereby distorting the concept of property when viewed from the perspective of comparative law.

Modern civil law continues to confound and be confounded by this ingenious fiction. English common law, on the other hand, largely escaped the Roman fiction, precisely because its law of property grew directly out of its primitive Anglo-Saxon and feudal notions of property.

1.2.Slavery and the personal domination. The idiom of power.

In the modem capitalistic slave systems of the Americas, especially that of the U.S.

South, the slave relation stands out as a direct, personal mode of domination in the midst of the prevailing indirect idiom. It is this, we suspect, which led Eugene Genovese to claim that the South was precapitalistic. It has now been persuasively demonstrated, however, that this society was thoroughly capitalistic.Slaves, because of their total flexibility, could be used as the perfect capitalistic work force as easily as they could be (and were) used as the perfect noncapitalistic retainer, concubine, or soldier. The problem that slavery created for the U.S. South and other capitalistic slave systems, therefore, was not economic but, as in primitive societies, ideological. The relation, even while promoting capitalism, undermined its major ideological rationalization: the indirect idiomatic mode expressed in the notion of a free wage labor force. The use of personally dominated individuals for the production and reproduction of wealth exposed the reality behind the so-called free labor. The laborer came to see his work for others for what it really was-alienation from the means of production and exploitation by the employer. Faced with the stark reality of personal power exercised over slaves, the worker could easily see that his much-vaunted freedom to change employers was simply a meaningless freedom to change masters.

In this way the free laborer became dangerously radicalized by the presence of slavery. Nonslave workers universally tended to despise work for others in all societies where a critical mass of slaves was used. It would be a mistake to say that slavery demeaned labor per se. What Moses Finley showed for ancient Greece held equally for the modern Americas: it was labor for others that was shunned, not labor in itself. Furthermore, it is not strictly correct to argue that slavery caused the contempt for labor; rather it exposed the demeaning nature of such labor. From a Marxian perspective, all labor for others who appropriate the means of production involves alienation and exploitation. It is, by its very nature, demeaning.

When the ideological camouflage is stripped from slavery, a crisis is created for the capitalist class. We can see this in the mass migration of free white labor from the Caribbean at the end of the seventeenth century as slave labor expanded rapidly, and it is evident in the mass migration of free farmers from the latifundia areas of Italy during the period of the late

republic.

1.3. Slave agency

Unlike white women, slaves could bring only one form of litigation to court, a manumission suit. Thus it is more difficult to find the traces of slaves’ own consciousness in legal records. By turning to other sources of African American consciousness, however, it is possible to piece together evidence of slaves’ attitudes to law and to commerce, and to speculate about how they might have understood or tried to influence legal transactions. Slaves were certainly keenly aware of the power of law in their lives. African Americans who fled slavery and went on to write or narrate their stories of bondage and escape often commented on the injustice of the white man’s law— “their judges, their courts of law, their representatives and legislators.” Many, if not most, fugitive slave narratives listed the variety of ways that law made blacks into property and deprived them of rights, sometimes quoting statute books by section number and page. Jon-Christian Suggs’s wonderful study of law and African American narrative, Whispered Consolations, highlights the centrality of law in African American consciousness.

Killing the social Self

Total power or property in the slave means exclusion of the claims and powers of others in him. If the master sought to exclude as far as possible all other claims and powers in his slave, it nevertheless remains true that he needed both the recognition and the support of the nonslave members of his community for his assumption of sovereign power over another person. An isolated master faced grave risks.

Plato, who knew what he was talking about on this issue, shrewdly pointed out that a slave owner within his community had nothing to fear from his slaves because the entire state was ready to defend each individual citizen. But if he and his immediate family with more than fifty slaves were transported to the middle of a desert where no freeman could come to his defense, that citizen would be in great fear for his own life and that of members of his family, and he would try to ingratiate himself with the slaves by making promises and offers of freedom.

Actually, the situation was more complex than this, for the danger the master faced was not merely physical. In all slaveholding societies the slave posed grave moral and spiritual dangers. Most slave populations have been so small that they were rarely considered a serious political menace; their danger lay in their capacity to offend supernaturally. The master's task, then, had both a negative and a positive aspect. On the negative side, he had to defuse the potential physical and spiritual threat posed by his slave's presence. And on the positive side, he had to secure extra coercive support for his power. Both were achieved by acquiring the thing we call authority.

If the slave no longer belonged to a community, if he had no social existence outside of his master, then what was he? The initial response in almost all slaveholding societies was to define the slave as a socially dead person. Claude Meillassoux and his associates have most thoroughly explored this aspect of slavery. They reject the simplistic materialist view, which fails to take account of this problem-which indeed does not even recognize the existence of the problem. From the structural viewpoint, Meillassoux argues, slavery must be seen as a process involving several transitional phases. The slave is violently uprooted from his milieu. He is desocialized and depersonalized. This process of social negation constitutes the first, essentially external, phase of enslavement. The next phase involves the introduction of the slave into the community of his master, but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a nonbeing. This explains the importance of law, custom, and ideology in the representation of the slave relation. Summarizing his own views and those of his associate Michel Izard, Meillassoux writes: "The captive always appears therefore as marked by an original, indelible defect which weighs endlessly upon his destiny. This is, in Izard's words, a kind of 'social death.' In almost all premodern slaveholding societies, at least some slaves were locally recruited. The problems these slaves posed were no different from those presented by the more dramatically disrupted captives. What was different, however, was the manner of their social death. I suggest that there were two ways in which social death was represented and culturally "explained," depending on the dominant early mode of recruiting slaves.

Where the earliest and most dominant mode of recruitment, ":as external, the cultural mode of representing social death was what I shall call intrusive and this was likely to continue even where, later, most slaves were internally recruited. The second way in which social death was represented may be called extrusive, and this too was determined by the earliest dominant means of recruiting slaves. It persisted even if, later, there was a shift to external sources. In the intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside-the "domestic enemy," as he was known in medieval Tuscany. He did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture. He stood, on the one hand, as a living affront to the local gods, an intruder in the sacred space (the cosmicized circle, as Mircea Eliade would say, that defined the community).

Prejudices and racism

Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life. Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white Americans, or with the United States as a whole. Slavery's twin relatives to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Racism in the western world stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking land from and destroying indigenous people and enslaving Africans to work the land. Arthur Kenneth O'Reillly has written a definitive work on the racial attitudes of America's first forty-two presidents and in each instance he reveals that political expediency always superceded moral and ethical governance. He states: ’’To write of the forty-two chief executives and their deeds and dreams on matters of late yields few profiles in courage and a great many profiles of men who acquired and analyzed only in search of more perfect ways to protect slavery or Jim Crow . . . . The story of the presidency and the politics of race is thus largely a story of choices made to acquiesce in, preserve, and adapt the original intent of 1789 to modern times.”

American slavery was an economic and political necessity without which the new republic would have certainly failed. Interestingly enough one of the most vociferous opponents of American slavery, David Walker, was one of the few abolitionists to articulate the economic necessity of free slave labor in seventeenth and eighteenth century America. Walker says, "The fact is, the labour of slaves comes so cheap to the avaricious usurpers, and is (as they think) of such great utility to the country where it exists, that those who are actuated by sordid avarice only, overlook the evils, which will as sure as the Lord lives, follow after the good."

3.1. Race and racism

What is Race? When some people use the "race" they attach a biological meaning, still others use "race" as a socially constructed concept. It is clear that even though race does not have a biological meaning, it does have a social meaning which has been legally constructed. Lawrence Blum (2002) examines both the concept of race and the problem of racism. He argues that “racism” be restricted to two referents: inferiorization, or the denigration of a group due to its putative biological inferiority; and antipathy, or the “bigotry, hostility, and hatred” towards another group defined by its putatively inherited physical traits (2002, 8). These two moral sins deserve this heightened level of condemnation associated with the term racism, because they violate moral norms of “respect, equality, and dignity” and because they are historically connected to extreme and overt forms of racial oppression (2002, 27). But because these connections make “racism” so morally loaded a term, it should not be applied to “lesser racial ills and infractions” that suggest mere ignorance, insensitivity or discomfort regarding members of different groups, since doing so will apply a disproportionate judgment against the person so named, closing off possible avenues for fruitful moral dialogue.

Continuing with the historical connection between racism and extreme oppression, Blum argues against using the term race, since this biologically defined term no longer has any biological foundation. Instead, he advocates using the term “racialized group” to denote those socially constructed identities whose supposedly inherited common physical traits are used to impose social, political, and economic costs. To Blum, “racialized group” creates distance from the biological conception of race and it admits of degrees, as in the case of Latinos, whom Blum describes as an “incompletely racialized group” (2002, 151). This terminological shift, and its supposed revelation of the socially constructed character of physiognomically defined identities, need not require the rejection of group-specific policies such as affirmative action. Members of socially constructed racialized identities suffer real harms, and laws might have to distinguish individuals according to their racialized identities in order to compensate for such harms. Nevertheless, Blum remains ambivalent about such measures, arguing that even when necessary they remain morally suspect (2002, 97). Similar ambivalence is also expressed by Anthony Appiah, earlier discussed regarding the metaphysics of race. While his metaphysical racial skepticism was cited as grounding his normative position of eliminativism, Appiah is “against races” but “for racial identities” (1996). Because a wide social consensus claims that races exist, individuals are ascribed to races regardless of their individual choices or desires. Moreover, racial identity remains far more salient and costly than ethnic identity (1996, 80-81). As a result, mobilization along racial lines is justifiable, in order to combat racism. But even at this point, Appiah still fears that racial identification may constrain individual autonomy by requiring members of racial groups to behave according to certain cultural norms or “scripts” that have become dominant within a specific racial group. Appiah thus concludes, “Racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism; but even as we struggle against racism…let us not let our racial identities subject us to new tyrannies” (1996, 104). This residual ambivalence, to recall the metaphysical discussions of the last section, perhaps ground Mallon's contention that Appiah remains an eliminativist rather than a racial constructivist, since ideally Appiah would prefer to be free of all residual constraints entailed by even socially constructed races. Notably, Blum believes that even Appiah's ambivalent espousal of racial identity undermines Appiah's radical critique of race, since it fails to require that those adopting racial identities for political reasons be sufficiently aware that race is a biologically false social construction (Blum 2002, 224-225,).

Violence and dehumanization as tools of oppression

Acts of violence are understandably common in narratives of the American slave, both acts of cruelty and intimidation perpetrated the master and acts of triumph and revenge carried out by the slave. Though the narratives themselves are incredibly varied, commonalities exist in how violence is depicted as both a means of oppression and of liberation. Violence and the threat of violence are represented as a means of breaking the slave’s spirit, promoting total control, and objectifying the slave. Yet many narratives also portray how violence comes to control both slave and master in an endless cycle of degradation and cruelty. In the hands of the slave however, the use of force or refusal to surrender to the threat of violence becomes an assertion of agency and free will. Through non-violent acts of defiance, violent assertions of agency and desperate acts of self-destruction, slave narratives explore the possibility of triumphing over violence as a tool of oppression.

4.1. Violence and social death

For centuries, persons African and of African descent, for themselves as well as for their associates and successors, have had to ponder the most fundamental questions of existence as a direct consequence of their life-constraining, life-distorting encounters with various self-racializing and other-racializing peoples of Europe, the Euro-Americas, and elsewhere. And in choosing to live and endure, peoples African and of African descent have had to forge, test out with their lives, and then refine and further live out explicit strategies by which to avoid being broken by brutality and humiliation and succumbing to fear, despair, or the soul-devouring obsession with vengence. They have had to share with their associates, and those succeeding them, their creative and sustaining legacies for infusing life with spirit-lifting artfulness and their articulated ponderings and strategies for surviving, living, and enduring with hope despite the circumstances. They have had to philosophize, and to share their philosophizings, in order to forge the cross-generational bonds of respectful, extended-family, community-sustaining love and mutuality without which neither survival nor endurance would have been possible.

Indeed, endurance of gendered and racialized colonization, enslavement, and oppression that would be continued for centuries required very compelling, sustaining, persuasive beliefs and nurtured investments in finding and creating soul-nurturing art and experience-verified praxis-guiding thoughtfulness. These beliefs and aesthetic considerations had to be articulated and communicated for sharing, sometimes surreptitiously, in order that persons and peoples endure. And enduring required that the brutalities and humiliations had to be countered that were directed, first and foremost, at the defining core of their very being—that is, at their foundational notions of themselves as persons and as distinctive, racialized peoples—so as to bring about their cross-generational living of social death (Patterson 1982). This particular persons did, throughout Africa and African Diasporas, and without either the guidance or sanction of academic philosophy and the discipline's most canonical practitioners even as some among the latter subjected African and African-descended peoples to their ontological racism. Slavery began as the violent and permanent overpowering of one person by another. Distinctive in its character and dialectics, it originated as a substitute for certain death and was maintained by brutality. Depending on the number of slaves involved and the kind of society in which the slaveholder lived, a variety of means of acquisition and enslavement were utilized by the slaveholder and his associates in recruiting persons to be parasitized.

The slave was natally alienated and condemned as a socially dead person, his existence having no legitimacy whatever. The slave's natal alienation and genealogical isolation made him or her the ideal human tool, an instrumentum vocal-perfectly flexible, unattached, and deracinated. To all members of the community the slave existed only through the parasite holder, who was called the master. On this intersubjective level the slaveholder fed on the slave to gain the very direct satisfactions of power over another, honor enhancement, and authority. The slave, losing in the process all claim to autonomous power, was degraded and reduced to a state of humiliation.

4.2. Violence as a state of “death-like ignorance” and control

In the world of the American slave, violence and control were intimately connected. As Frederick Douglass notes, “Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest,” a sentiment that points to the cyclical nature of violence against the enslaved. The lash, cane or raised hand was meant to produce docility in the slave and this desire for control promoted endless iterations of violence. Abuse, as Douglass observed, only begot further and more severe abuse, in an endless pattern of brutality.

Yet Douglass’s conception of violence contains additional significance, offering the possibility for resistance and suggesting that those who lift themselves up from degradation and endure are less likely to be the victims of violence. The ubiquity and severity of violence in slavery is something that is represented in a great variety of slave narratives. Though many of these narratives served to promote awareness of the inherent brutality of slavery, this was not their only function; representations of violence also allowed slave narratives to evaluate how violence destroyed both master and slave and to explore the various forms of resistance that might render violent oppression ineffective. The use of violence designed to objectify the slave and keep him or her in a state of hopelessness and despair can also be observed in the narratives of those who suffered under the yoke of legal slavery in the American South. In his “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” David Walker makes the connection between violent oppression and ignorance, arguing that force is used in order to deprive the slave of all knowledge of their rights and of God. According to Walker, slaves are kept in an abject state of “death-like ignorance” in order to degrade their spirits and maintain their status as pieces of property: "First, no trifling portion of them will beat us nearly to death, if they find us on our knees praying to God… they keep us sunk in ignorance… If they find us with a book of any description in our hand, they will beat us nearly to death–they are so afraid we will learn to read, and enlighten our dark and benighted minds… They keep us in the most death-like ignorance by keeping us from all source of information, and call us, who are free men and next to the Angels of God, their property! "

Violence was thus frequently used with the goal of preventing the slave from gaining any sort of agency, whether it be religious or intellectual. Beatings were meant to discourage learning, literacy and piety; violence was used by those with knowledge to keep those without it in a state of wretched ignorance. Walker thus represents violence as a tool of the master, used to separate the slave from tools of empowerment: namely, religion and education.

4.3. Defiance and self-destruction

The notion of facing violence and death without fear is one that is common to many slave narratives. By accepting the possibility of death in their struggle, slaves reclaim a measure of influence over their own destiny. In addition, by refusing to be controlled by violence or threats of violence, slaves deplete the efficacy of their master’s tools of oppression. Though Douglass’s “turning point” involves him committing an act of violence himself, slave narratives represent multiple ways of undermining the brutality and injustice perpetrated against them. Resistance to violent oppression can be seen as taking three different forms: non-violent, violent and self-destructive, of which there are multiple examples of each. The commonality that unites all of these methods of resistance is the decision to refuse to be controlled by violence, even in the face of death. In her struggle to liberate her “sisters” Christine Stark relates such feelings of defiance. “And I will be free,” she writes, “and I will help women and girls escape, or I will die trying.”

Non-violent resistance, though it does not involve the use of force on the part of the slave, is nevertheless just as dangerous and effective as other forms of resistance. In Our Nig, Frado achieves a victory over her mistress by refusing to carry a pile of wood into the house. Though Mrs. Belmont threatens to beat her savagely with a stick, Frado refuses to comply. “Stop,” she exclaims, “strike me, and I'll never work a mite more for you.” Mrs. Belmont desists and ultimately ends up carrying the load of wood herself. Frado thus discovers that she has the “power to ward off assaults” by refusing to be controlled by violence. This decision to resist, though it involves only the simple act of disobedience, nevertheless represents the acceptance of the possible violent consequences. By refusing Mrs. Belmont’s request, Frado discovers how to loosen her mistress’s hold over her; she comes to understand that Mrs. Belmont’s control is dependent upon violence and if she faces this threat of violence instead of bowing to it, she can regain a measure of control over her life. The refusal yield to violent oppression can also take the form retaliation, as is the case with Frederick Douglass. As Douglass writes after his fight with Mr. Covey, “I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.” Through this statement of defiance, Douglass indicates how he has become free from the physical violence and degradation inherent to the practice of whipping. “From this time,” he reports, “I was never again what might be called fairly whipped, though I remained a slave four years afterwards.” Douglass marks this act of violence and defiance as the moment of his liberation, though he is not freed until four years later. The decision to resist and risk death is a liberating one because it deprives the master’s use of violence of its potency. By resisting Covey, Douglass regains a measure of control and discovers a “turning point” towards eventual freedom.

These types of defiance in the face of violence can also be taken one fatal step further by becoming acts of self-destruction. In William Wells Brown’s Clotel, self-violence is analyzed as a means of reclaiming control and achieving freedom. Towards the end of the narrative, Clotel, cornered by an angry mob, throws herself off a bridge to her death. “She clasped her hands convulsively,” Brown writes, “and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes towards heaven, and begged for that mercy and compassion there, which had been denied her on earth; and then, with a single bound, she vaulted over the railings of the bridge, and sunk for ever beneath the waves of the river!” In her final moments, Clotel is faced with the choice of re-enslavement or death. After offering up a hasty and desperate prayer to the heavens, she chooses certain death, launching herself into the Potomac. In doing so, Clotel re-claims control of her destiny in a final act of self-violence. In this instance, Brown equates freedom and death. In the elegiac poem that closes the chapter, the narrator celebrates this choice proclaiming, “ Joy! The hunted slave is free!” In addition, the title of the chapter itself is the simple declarative “Death is Freedom.” This title is not without irony, yet it still illustrates Clotel’s profound choice to face death. The fact that she would choose an act of self-destruction over re-enslavement serves to emphasize the horrid brutality of slave.

Cultural trauma and collective memory

The notion of cultural trauma implies that direct experience of an event is not a necessary condition for its inclusion in the trauma process. It is through time-delayed and negotiated recollection that cultural trauma is experienced, a process which places representation in a key role. How an event is remembered is intimately entwined with how it is represented. Here the means and media of representation are crucial, for they bridge the gap between individuals and

between occurrence and its recollection. Social psychological studies provide grounds for a theory of generational cycles in the reconstruction of collective memory and the role of the media in that process.

After analyzing various examples, Pennebaker and Banasik (1997) found that approximately every twenty to thirty years individuals look back and reconstruct a “traumatic” past. In applying this account to their study of the remembrance of the Spanish Civil War, Igartua and Paez (1997:83–84) list four factors that underlie and help explain this generational cycle:

1. The existence of the necessary psychological distance that remembering a collective or individual traumatic event requires. Time may soothe and lessen the pain that remembering a traumatic event produces.

2. The necessary accumulation of social resources in order to undergo the commemoration activities. These resources can usually be obtained during one’s middle age. The events are commemorated when the generation which suffered them has the money and power to commemorate them.

3. The most important events in one’s life take place when one is 12–25 years old. When these

people grow older they may remember the events that happened during this period.

4. The sociopolitical repression will cease to act after 20–30 years because those directly responsible for the repression, war, and so on, have either socially or physically disappeared.

If we leave aside their assumption that an event can be traumatic in itself, this framework is useful in the analysis of collective memory. Igartua and Paez emphasize the difference between a generation shaped by the direct experience of an event and those that follow, for whom memory is mediated in a different way. They point to the issue of power and access to the means of representation, which are essential for public commemoration and the framing of collective

memory. They also place special emphasis on the role of art and of representation generally in this process.

This socially constructed, historically rooted collective memory functions to create social solidarity in the present. As developed by followers of Durkheim such as Maurice Halbwachs (1992), memory is collective in that it is supra-individual, and individual memory is conceived in relation to a group, be this geographical, positional, ideological, political, or generationally

based. In Halbwachs’ classical account, memory is always group memory, both because the individual is derivative of some collectivity, family, and community, and also because a group is solidified and becomes aware of itself through continuous reflection upon and recreation of a distinctive, shared memory. Individual identity is said to be negotiated within this collectively shared past. Thus, while there is always a unique, biographical memory to draw upon, it

is described as always rooted in a collective history. This collective memory provides the individual with a cognitive map within which to orient present behavior.

From this perspective, collective memory is a social necessity; neither an individual nor a society can do without it. As Bernhard Giesen (in Alexander et al. 2001) points out, collective memory provides both individual and society with a temporal map, unifying a nation or community through time as well as space. Collective memory specifies the temporal parameters of past and future, where we came from and where we are going, and also why we are here now.

Within the narrative provided by this collective memory individual identities are shaped as experiential frameworks formed out of, as they are embedded within, narratives of past, present and future.

5.1.Cultural trauma

If slavery was traumatic for this generation of intellectuals, it was so in retrospect, mediated through recollection and reflection, and, for some, tinged with some strategic, practical, and political interest.

As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion. In this sense, the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all. While it may be necessary to establish some

event as the significant “cause,” its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation. Arthur Neal (1998) defines a “national trauma” according to its “enduring effects,” and as relating to events “which cannot be easily dismissed, which will be played over again and again in individual consciousness,” becoming “ingrained in collective memory.” In this account, a national trauma must be understood, explained, and made coherent through public reflection and discourse.

Here, mass-mediated representations play a decisive role. This is also the case in what we have called cultural trauma. Neil Smelser (in Alexander et al. 2001) offers a more formal definition of cultural trauma that is worth repeating: “a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative

affect, (b) represented as indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.” In the current case, the phrase “or group’s identity” could be added to the last sentence. It is the collective memory of slavery that defines an individual as a “race member,” as Maya Angelou (1976) puts it.

In Cathy Caruth’s (1995:17; Caruth 1996) psychoanalytic theory of trauma, it is not the experience itself that produces traumatic effect, but rather the remembrance of it. In her account there is always a time lapse, a period of “latency” in which forgetting is characteristic, between an event and the experience of trauma. As reflective process, trauma links past to present through representations and imagination. In psychological accounts, this can lead to a distorted identity-formation, where “certain subject-positions may become especially prominent or even overwhelming, for example, those of victim or perpetrator . . . wherein one is possessed by the past and tends to repeat it compulsively as if it were fully present” (LaCapra 1994:12).

5.2. Music importance in slavery and popular culture – cultural identity and cohesion

It was not by chance that Du Bois pointed to music as a foundation of African American culture. Music, including dance, after all, had been one of the few forms of cultural expression relatively open to slaves to participate in and was a central means for the constitution of a collective identity and the articulation of hopes and dreams. Paradoxically, itwas also in song that the first reference to the notion of the African American appeared, with the opposite reference than that Du Bois intended. In 1863 the “Old Cremona Songster” records these lines: “I’d buy up all de niggers – de niggers – de colored African American citizens” (Oxford Dictionary). Here was acknowledged both the new and the old, the citizenship promised after emancipation and the continued desire to own blacks.

As a basis for unification and collective identity in this context of reaction, the slave songs were a curious choice of music, since many middle-class blacks at the time refused to listen to them for the very reason Du Bois was moved by them: they represented a past they wished to forget. However, it was not the slave songs as folk expression that Du Bois referred to, but rather their performance as concert or art music. The songs he experienced were staged performances, not folk expressions. Later, Zora Neale Hurston would write “there are no true spirituals.” At the time, however, especially under the onslaught of popular culture parody and “falsification,” the search for authenticity and roots was a preview of things to come. De Bois was one of the first and few intellectuals of his generation to argue for a distinctive African basis of slave culture and to call this up to memory. His judgment of this “culture,” however, was colored by a distinctive European bias. Du Bois may have found common ground in the slave songs, but it was their “polished” performance that moved him. Du Bois mentions the songs in connection to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hall in Nashville built with the monies earned on the basis of their concert performances in the 1870s, which, he recounts, included those “before the Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland” (Du Bois 1903:179). Du Bois is justly proud of this achievement, but it reflects not only his program of cultural missionary work as a measure of racial progress and pride, but also his model of culture, where racial progress was linked to cultural refinement. He is himself an example of the “double consciousness” he so aptly named: the slave songs speak to blacks and form a potential basis of racial identity, but they also speak to whites, to reveal the “soul of the black man” which “stands to-day. Music held a central place in the day-to-day lives of African-American plantation workers. They sang to make their endless days of labor less grim. As the gangs worked, they used their music to keep a rhythmic motion going. At the end of the day, they sang traditional songs to remember the ways and wisdom of their ancestors. In their celebrations, they joined together in gospel music that called on the Christian God who promised deliverance to the enslaved.

Some songs had hidden, or encoded, messages. The lyrics to these tunes passed along information that had to be kept secret from slaveholders and overseers. For example, “Wade in the Water” told would-be fugitives that they should escape via the river. Among other reasons, the bloodhounds of the slave chasers would lose the scent at the water’s edge. These song-messages became especially important to the slaves as stories of the Union army’s whereabouts spread.

Reparation and compensation, applied to the loss of identity

Certainly reparation is not defined as making the wrongly harmed equal to others. On the face of it, equality seems really to have little to do with reparation. People deserve reparation when they have been harmed by transgression and it is not necessary that in being thus harmed they are also made worse off than others. A person may be harmed and disadvantaged as a result of transgression and may therefore deserve reparation and yet be better off than others. Similarly a person may be worse off than others without having suffered from any harm or disadvantage for which he deserves reparation. The point of reparation is not to make people equal to others. It is as far as possible to put people in the condition they would have been in had they not been wrongly injured. This may make them equal to others, but it may not. It can leave them worse off than others and it can also very easily make them better off than others. Perhaps the assumption that the reparation owed to black is to be made equal to whites relies on the further assumption that equality is the ideal requirement of distributive justice, while corrective justice is designed to return us to that ideal when we happen to stray from it, and consequently is superseded by the demands of distributive justice. But this view gets little support from the history of corrective and distributive justice. Few theories of distributive justice claim that the just distribution is an equal distribution. Compensation is the broader term. As suggested in Locke's discussion reparation along with punishment are parts of corrective as opposed to distributive justice. Logically, if someone deserves reparation then necessarily someone has acted wrongly and harmed or injured him as a result. To deserve reparation one must have suffered some harm or loss as a result of someone's wrongful act. Compensation means making up for or counteracting some loss or lack of something useful or valuable. The loss of lack may not be due to any wrong doing. Thus though suffering some loss or harm does not necessarily make one deserving of reparation it may make one deserving of compensation. And a person need not owe others reparation even if his actions caused them to be harmed; to owe them reparation his actions that caused them harm must also have been wrongful.

Compensation is such cases may be something that citizens are owed by their governments. In sum logically the appropriateness of compensation does not imply wrongdoing or even harm. To say that people deserve compensation is not to say or imply they have been harmed, and is certainly not to say or imply that they have been harmed as a result of anyone's wrongful actions.

Reparation is always backward looking in the sense that to say that someone who is harmed deserves reparation is necessarily to imply that a search into the causes of his harm will show that his harms were caused by some other party's wrongful action. Compensation is not backward looking in this sense. A person may be appropriately compensated simply because in his present condition he cannot function or act satisfactorily. A lame person may be compensated for his disability with a wheel chair even if no one caused his disability. Often an individual can help to compensate for his own disabilities. A blind man who compensates for his blindness by developing his sense of hearing provides an example. People do not similarly help in their own reparation though of course they can help to compensate for the harms for which they deserve reparation. A person who is viciously or negligently blinded by another can compensate for his disability in the ways noted above, but in doing so he is not making reparation to himself.

Finally reparation and compensation have different objects. Reparation's object is to make the harmed person whole again, or to bring her to the condition she would have been in had she not been wrongly harmed, though of course naturally this object often cannot be completely secured. In making her whole again special consideration must be given to the fact that she was wronged and not merely harmed. Thus apology and concession of wrong doing is essential to reparation for it is essential to the object of reparation which is to return the injured person to the position of respect he had before he was wrongly injured. Compensation has a different object. It must because unlike reparation it does not imply that anyone has been wronged. The object of compensation is to enable someone who suffers from some loss or lack or harm to function at a level above what she would function given her loss or lack or harm. Naturally a person may get little compensation or complete compensation. What she should get will depend on many things. Suppose she has insured herself against the loss she has suffered. In that case how much compensation she should get will depend on how much of her losses the insurance company has pledged itself to compensate. If it has pledged itself to compensate her in full, its responsibilities will be very much like that of someone who must make reparation to those he wrongfully harmed, though of course even in such cases the insurance company cannot be said to be making reparation to her since it has not wrongfully harmed her. If she is uninsured she may receive little compensation. How much compensation she deserves will depend on the obligations the community has to its members who are harmed or suffer from some lack.

6.1. Reparations for slavery

Given our earlier sketch of the essentials of reparation, Thaddeus Stevens's proposal for slave reparations is easily stated and apparently ironclad. The slave holders had committed serious transgressions that harmed the slaves. Consequently they were obligated to make reparation to their slaves and confiscating their land and distributing it to the slaves would plausibly contribute to or constitute that reparation.

But the argument for black reparations today is not the argument that the slaves deserved reparation for the harms that slavery caused them. No one questions that argument. The argument for black reparations today, the argument that many question, is that present, living African Americans deserve reparation from the American people or the American government for reasons that stem somehow from the enslavement of their ancestors three hundred years by the American people with the permission and blessing of the American government. It seems to get no support from the almost universally acknowledged claim that the slaves themselves deserved reparations from the slave holders or the government. No one can demand reparation for another's harm, even if the other is his ancestor.

But several arguments have been urged to circumvent this difficulty. They may turn out to be based on poor or at least unsound arguments. And if sound they may turn out to justify demands that are exorbitant and politically impossible to satisfy. But our business is to see what they are, and to judge their soundness. If they are sound we should see where they lead even if they lead to demands that are not politically feasible. Later we can see what can be done to make their demands feasible.

6.2. Reparation and affirmative action

As we have suggested, reparation can take many forms depending on the harm it is meant to repair and what is necessary to repair that harm. As we saw earlier it can take the form of according territory to a people or nation that has wrongly lost its territory. In the case of slavery as Thaddeus Stevens urged it could take the form of according the freedmen forty acres and a mule to enable them to become thriving free holders. Conceivably reparation for blacks could take the form of affirmative action. Suppose, to take the most straightforward case, that a firm wronged a black person by denying her on account of her race a well paying position she was most qualified for. And suppose too, as is not unlikely, that she was harmed as a result of that injustice. Plausibly the firm would owe her reparation for wrongly harming her, and that reparation, also plausibly could appropriately take the form of hiring her affirmatively, that is, in preference over better qualified candidates for the same position if it became available. In fact when affirmative action was introduced some years ago its fiercest and most effective critics usually claimed that they would support it if it involved reparation of the sort just described. The problem as they saw it was that most of the affirmative action that was practiced was not of that sort. As they were fond of pointing out, most of affirmative action's beneficiaries were young well qualified men and women who were entering the job market for the first time and were therefore not victims of racial discrimination in employment. It was conceded that their parents and grandparents had probably suffered from such discrimination, and could therefore perhaps demand preferential treatment, though this concession was always accompanied by the warning that in order to actually get preferential treatment these older victims of discrimination would have to prove make their case in court—a requirement which of course was almost impossible to satisfy.

The defenders of affirmative action tried to meet the critics' objections in various ways, for example, by pointing out that if the youngsters' parents and grandparents had suffered from unjust racial discrimination, then the youngsters too had probably suffered from such discrimination even if indirectly and even if they were entering the job market for the first time. But this reply had already been anticipated and rebutted by the requirement that the parents and grandparents had to prove that they had suffered from unjust racial discrimination in court. The defenders of affirmative action tried more complicated perhaps more desperate replies, but their attempts to justify affirmative action as reparation did not last long. Perhaps this was because the Supreme Court had offered a far easier and less ostensibly less divisive way to justify affirmative action. In the Bakke decision of 1978 the Court rejected the argument that affirmative action for blacks could be justified as compensation for disadvantages caused by past unjust racial discrimination, but allowed that such affirmative action could be justified to secure “diversity.” Although this new argument is still very controversial, it is far more popular than the older argument that tried to justify affirmative action as reparation. But even if the Court is right and that affirmative action cannot be justified as reparation for past unjust discrimination against blacks, it does not follow that reparation for blacks cannot be justified. Since this essay is about reparation and not specifically about affirmative action it will not attempt to revive the reparations argument for affirmative action.

6.3.Two arguments for black reparations

There are two main arguments for black reparations. These arguments are the harm argument and the inheritance argument. The harm argument can be summarized as follows: slavery involved many transgressions against the slaves. The slaves were harmed by these transgressions. These harms initiated an unbroken chain of harms linked as cause and effect that persists to the present day. Since present day African Americans therefore suffer from harms caused by the transgressions of slavery it follows from the principles of reparative justice that they deserve reparation for those harms.

The inheritance argument can be summarized as follows: the slave holders wrongly harmed their slaves and the slaves deserved reparation for those harms; but they were never given that reparation. Consequently, it passes by the right of inheritance to present day African Americans who are the descendents and heirs of the slaves.

Both the harm argument and the inheritance argument connect slavery to the demand for black reparations. But there are important differences between. Although both arguments assume that slavery's transgressions harmed the slaves, only the harm argument maintains that these transgressions have also harmed present day African Americans who therefore deserve reparation for their harms. The inheritance argument does not insist that slavery's transgressions have harmed the present day African Americans. Its crucial premise is that the present black population has inherited a right to the reparation owed to their slave ancestors for the harms they suffered as slaves, but which was never paid.

The harm argument and the inheritance argument would be drawn more closely together if harm is defined so that the bare failure of African Americans to receive their due inheritance necessarily counts as a harm to them. That possibility will not be explored here, but instead take harm to be some damage or loss to one's personal capabilities whether physical or mental like a loss of health or a lack of proper education.

Slavery as parasitism

Conceiving of slavery as a relation of parasitism has many advantages. Parasitism emphasizes the asymmetry of all such unequal relations: the degree to which the parasite depends on the host is not necessarily a direct measure of the extent to which the host is exploited in supporting the parasite. A parasite may be only partially dependent on its host, but this partial dependence may entail the destruction of the host. Or the host may be totally dependent on the parasite, but the parasitism may only partially influence the host–or may have no effects beyond being a minor nuisance, in which case the relation approaches what biologists call commensalism. conceptualizing the complexities of dependence. It took the arcane philosophical language of Hegel to uncover what quickly becomes apparent when the conceptual framework of parasitism is used: the dominator, in the process of dominating and making another individual dependent, also makes himself (the dominator) dependent.

At the same time, the paradox of domination can be expressed without taking the argument to its limits. Parasitism suggests a continuum ranging from minor dependence or exploitation to major "Hegelian" dependence on the part of the dominator and grave survival risks for the dominated. The various combinations of parasitic-dependent and parasitized-exploited may be graded on a continuum ranging from a point just prior to true mutualism to one just this side of total parasitism.

We move closer to the uniquely human aspects of parasitism when we begin to consider the personal satisfaction that the parties experience in their interaction. A significant step in this direction has been provided by the sociologist Anatol Rapoport, who in a fascinating theoretical analysis of human parasitism has shown that while the behavior of the parasitized party is what common sense suggests-he recognizes that the situation is harmful for him

under any circumstances and that it is always in his best interest to get out of it-the behavior of the parasite is not so easily understood. The crucial advantage of this approach is that it offers a useful way of conceptualizing the complexities of dependence. It took the arcane philosophical language of Hegel to uncover what quickly becomes apparent when the conceptual framework of parasitism is used: the dominator, in the process of dominating and making another individual dependent, also makes himself (the dominator) dependent.

At the same time, the paradox of domination can be expressed without taking the argument to its limits. Parasitism suggests a continuum ranging from minor dependence or exploitation to major "Hegelian" dependence on the part of the dominator and grave survival risks for the dominated. The various combinations of parasitic-dependent and parasitized-exploited may be graded on a continuum ranging from a point just prior to true mutualism

to one just this side of total parasitism. We move closer to the uniquely human aspects of parasitism when we begin to consider the personal satisfaction that the parties experience in their

interaction. A significant step in this direction has been provided by the sociologist Anatol Rapoport, who in a fascinating theoretical analysis of human parasitism has shown that while the behavior of the parasitized party is what common sense suggests-he recognizes that the situation is harmful for him under any circumstances and that it is always in his best interes to get out of

it-the behavior of the parasite is not so easily understood. On the macrosociological level the parasitism framework is also valuable as a heuristic device. Instead of individual holders and slaves constituting the units in the relationship, the institution of slavery is conceived of as a

single process that operates on the total social system. The systemic parasitization of the slaveholder's culture and society naturally reinforces the direct personal parasitism of the slaveholder on his slave. In this sense the slave may be said to suffer both personal and institutional parasitism.

Masters and slaves

The slave everywhere was held as an extension of his master, a vocal instrument without will except where this worked against the slave. By performing this act of mutilation, the slave achieved three objectives in one fell swoop. First, he succeeded in changing his master. Second, he gained revenge against the master, in that the latter always came out a net loser. (It is significant that when the damage was to the intended master's property, it was only superficial; but when, as in Saudi Arabia, the damage was done to property belonging to the present master, it was real and substantial-a camel was slain, no doubt the master's favorite.) Third, the slave, if only temporarily, asserted his will. This was indeed an act of individual rebellion-not political, to be sure, but not religious either. Rather, it belonged to the category that Albert Camus calls existential. It is not by accident that Camus opens his great work, The Rebel– by citing the slave rebel as the archetypal existential rebel. By saying no, the slave set limits beyond which he could not and would not be demeaned. He demanded a recognition of his humanity not only in a manner that worked against him-for every slave came to realize existentially what Camus arrived at intellectually: that it is not possible to deny another person his humanity, the worst the oppressor can do is recognize it negatively and exploitatively-but in a manner that worked for him, in his own interest. This was the true interpretation of the practice. Seen in this light, it is not a peculiar custom of Islamic culture but an imperative of the slave condition. The fact cannot be gainsaid, however, that exchange of masters was found overwhelmingly in Islamic lands. Why is this? The answer is that Islamic law enjoins the master to change his slave if the latter is excessively unhappy with his treatment. The normal method of changing masters was simply for the slave to demand such a change, which the master was duty bound to honor. The custom of abusing the proposed master's property was used only when the master refused to obey the dictates of his religion. Thus, far from being a symbolic harking back to pagan times, the custom was an affirmation of Islamic religious law. This law, however, only made possible the expression of the practice; indeed, the custom was· obviated if the law was followed. Islamic law does not explain the custom as such; it only explains the frequency of its occurrence in Islamic societies. The practice itself is explained by factors inherent in the condition of slavery. At the same time, the absence of any requirement in the other major religions to sell an unhappy slave explains the infrequency of the practice elsewhere. This does not mean that the imperatives of slavery were not present in such societies, or that the slave's yearning for vengeance and the positive affirmation of his will were not as pressing. It is, rather, that they had to be expressed in other ways. The ground rules laid down by the master class determined how the slave reacted, how he manipulated or, when necessary, broke the rules. The fact that an extremely unhappy slave could have his master changed was an important safety valve. Other slaveholding peoples have had other safety valves-liberal laws, a high rate of manumission, a sufficient incidence of slaves allowed to hire themselves out and live apart from their masters, effective forms of sanctuary, fictive kinship assimilation, adequate physical treatment, to list some of the more familiar.And still other slaveholding societies had no safety valves at all, relying mainly on brute force.

The most important conclusion is that the master-slave relationship was not a static one in which an active master constantly got his way against a wholly passive slave.

In spite of the extreme power of the master, certain constraints were inherent in the very nature of this relationship. One was the self-interest of the master himself. The whole point of keeping slaves was to get them to serve him, in whatever capacity he chose, to the best of their ability. To achieve this objective the master could use various combinations of punishments and rewards. Slavery was unusual in the extraordinary extent to which the

slave could be punished for not serving-even to the extreme of murder. But a dead slave, or one incapacitated by brutalization, was a useless slave. This stark fact, plus the recognition that incentives usually work more effectively than punishment in inducing service, was enough to encourage most masters in all slave holding societies to search for the best balance between reward and punishment.

The second category of constraints was the slaves themselves. Powerless, isolated, and degraded in the eyes of nonslaves they may have been, but they struggled constantly to set limits beyond which they would not be expected to go. In so doing, they could regularize their relationships with the persons who parasitized them and carve out some measure of predictability, if never legitimacy, in their social behavior.

Both masters and slaves, then, had to adjust to one another. Just how much the master would concede in order to gain, and just how much of the master's parasitism the slave would take before declaring a limit, varied considerably both within slaveholding societies and between them. It is trite and untrue-to say that the relationship that emerged varied with the character

of the master. For even on an individual level the condition of the slave varied with the character of the slave also, as well as with the social and economic circumstances that impinged on the dynamics of the interaction between slaveholder and slave.

The experience of the U.S. South, which presents us with a richer body of data than any other slave holding society (including the testimony of hundreds of ex-slaves), fully supports this general conclusion. From his study of the W.P.A. and Fisk University slave narrative collections, Stephen C. Crawford found that in spite of the total legal power of the masters, self-interest and the determination of the slave to survive as best he or she could create an environment in which slaves could even "significantly control their personal probability of punishment." Self-interest dictated that punishment was not used mainly as a labor promoter but as a form of social control. Slaves also had some option in the kind of household structures they established, and appropriate choice of such structures could reduce the risk of punishment of children and sale away from family and friends.

None of this, of course, implies that the system was not oppressively weighted against the slave. Beyond the character of the master, there were other key features in the environment that the slaves could do nothing about. One was the size of the farm unit on which they lived, another was its location. Both were crucial in determining the condition of slaves in the United States, as they were in all other advanced slave systems. Large farms meant a higher level of whippings, less contact with owners, fewer chances therefore to manipulate the political psychology of the relation, and more work. But even if the slave had some choice in the size and location of the farm on which he lived, he would still be faced with a no-win situation. Small farms, while physically less demanding, offering more opportunities to acquire skills, and allowing far more contact with (and manipulation of) the owner, had their own special horrors. More personal contact meant greater exposure to sexual exploitation for slave women, including the not infrequent experience of gang rape by adolescent kinsmen of the owner. The probabilities of family breakup as the result of such sexual exploitation, and of being sold away, were also greater on such farms.

As Orlando Petterson considers, all these examples give some idea of the complexities of both the relation The Condition of Slavery ship itself, and the conditions that influenced it. In macrosociological terms the U.S. South, as I have repeatedly emphasized (and will have reason to do again), was rather unusual. But it shared with all slaveholding societies certain imperatives of the interaction between slaveholder and slave. Among these was the fact that in southern slavery, as in all other slaveries, there was a constant struggle between master and slave in the effort of the former to gain as much as possible for himself with the least possible loss, including the self-defeating loss of his slave, and the effort of the latter to minimize the burden of his exploitation and enhance the regularity and predictability of his existence. It is a mistake to characterize such a highly asymmetric interaction as one of "give-and-take," as Crawford does in his otherwise impressive study! So Husbands and wives give and take, sometimes; employers and wage earners, maybe; masters and slaves, never. What masters and slaves do is struggle: sometimes noisily, more often quietly; sometimes violently, more often surreptitiously; infrequently with arms, always with the weapons of the mind and soul.

Slavery and the loss of identity – an example

Although the slave might be socially dead, he remained nonetheless an element of society. So the problem arose: how was he to be incorporated? Religion explains how it is possible to relate to the dead who still live. It says little about how ordinary people should relate to the living who are dead. This is the final cultural dilemma posed by the problem of slavery. James H. Vaughan, in his analysis of slavery (mafakur) among the Margi of Nigeria, has addressed this problem with considerable insight. He tells us that traditional Margi society was "in theory, a closed system, recognizing birth as the only method of recruitment." Any outsider was an intruder into this social space and must remain an alien; but, equally, the insider who committed some capital crime offended the gods and his ancestors and in so doing broke society's invisible boundaries and made himself an alien.

The population of slaves among the Margi comprised both types of aliens, although the dominant representation of their social death was intrusive. The rich diversity of groups surrounding the Margi make them particularly aware of their social space. As Vaughan observes: "They are sensitive to a unifying 'Marginess'–largely consensual-that distinguishes them from the numerous other societies around them," and slaves are those who have breached "the boundaries of this closed system."

The institution of slavery "bestows a rational–even utilitarian-place upon the anomaly of the permanent resident alien, by giving him an institutional marginality." Furthermore:

The outstanding general characteristic of mafakur is that all mafa, withoutregard to political position, private influence, or wealth, hold in common a status that in structural terms is fundamentally and irrevocably intermediate with regard to membership in Margi society. But it is equally apparent that, despite their marginal status, their roles are fully integrated into society. Thus slavery involved two contradictory principles, marginality and integration, and Margi society reconciled this contradiction by "formalizing the marginality." Hence Vaughan calls the institution "limbic" (I prefer the more common anthropological term "liminal") "for its members exist in the hem of society, in a limbo, neither enfranchised Margi nor true aliens." But the Margi also enslaved local offenders, and these too were assimilated to the same limbic or liminal status of the institutionalized outsider. The criminal "remained in the society: a part of it, yet apart from it. He was not [physically] expelled, for that would be less humiliating . . . Rather, it was the loss of identity and normality that was so objectionable to the proud Margi."

Institutionalized marginality, the state of social death, was the ultimate cultural outcome of the loss of natality as well as honor and power. It was in this too that the master's authority rested. For it was he who in a godlike manner mediated between the socially dead and the socially alive. Without the master, as the Tuareg insist, the slave does not exist. The slave came to obey him not only out of fear, but out of the basic need to exist as a quasi-person, however marginal and vicarious that existence might be.

Chapter III

Toni Morrisons’ Beloved – Slavery and the loss of identity

As Rafael Perez-Torres starts his analysis about Beloved as a postmodern novel, ”in Toni Morrison’s book, the fictional characters and communities transform an essential absence into a powerful presence”. Beloved weaves a story on a singular frame: interpretation represents an integral part of black cultural and social identity. Beloved creates an aesthetic identity by playing against and through the cultural field of postmodernism. Perez-Torres focuses on how absence is turned into a powerful presence in Morrison’s fiction. The creation of a black identity out of exploitation and oppression is seen as analogous to Morrison’s creation of an aesthetic identity in Beloved which counters the marginalisation and invisibility of black expression.like other critics of Morrison’s work, Torres highlights the importance of the power of naming an renaming. The key absences upon which Beloved is premised are identified as the absence of power, of self-determination, of homeland and personal identity. In Beloved, Morrison transforms absence into a powerful presence by converting the shame her oppressed characters suffer from into self-awareness. She creates this aesthetic identity "by playing against and through the cultural minefield of postmodernism," challenging received notions of postmodernism and engaging some of the very complex issues that make up American cultural identity.

The struggle with the concept of slavery as a whole – hystorical denial, persistence and the healing process

Toni Morrisons’Beloved reconceptualizes American history. Most apparent in the novel is the historical perspective: Morrison constructs history through the acts and consciousness of African-American slaves rather than through the perspective of the dominant white social

classes. But historical methodology takes another vital shift in Beloved; history-making becomes a healing process for the characters, the reader, and the author. In Beloved, Morrison constructs a parallel between the individual processes of psychological recovery and a historical or national process. Sethe, the central character in the novel, describes the relationship between

the individual and the historical unconscious:

”If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened. (36)”

If Sethe's individual memories exist in the world as fragments of a historical memory, then, by extension, the individual process of recollection or "rememory" can be reproduced on a historical level. Thus, Sethe's process of healing in Beloved, her process of learning to live with her past, is a model for the readers who must confront Sethe's past as part of our own past, a collective past that lives right here where we live.

Morrison uses ritual as a model for the healing process. Rituals function as formal events in which symbolic representations—such as dance, song, story, and other activities—are spiritually and communally endowed with the power to shape real relations in the world. In Beloved, ritual processes also imply particular notions of pedagogy and epistemology in which—by way of contrast with dominant Western traditions—knowledge is multiple, context-dependent, collectively asserted, and spiritually derived. Through her assertion of the transformative power of ritual and the incorporation of rituals of healing into her narrative, Morrison invests the novel with the potential to construct and transform individual consciousness as well as social relations.

To make the novel work as a ritual, Morrison adapts techniques from modernist novels, such as the fragmentation of the plot and a shifting narrative voice, to compel the reader to actively construct an interpretive framework. In Beloved, the reader's process of reconstructing the fragmented story parallels Sethe's psychological recovery: repressed fragments of the (fictionalized) personal and historical past are retrieved and reconstructed. Morrison also introduces oral narrative techniques—repetition, the blending of voices, a shifting narrative voice, and an episodic framework— that help to simulate the aural, participatory dynamics of ritual within the private, introspective form of the novel. In many oral traditions, storytelling and poetry are inseparable from ritual, since words as sounds are perceived as more than concepts; they are events with consequences. Morrison uses modernist and oral techniques in conjunction with specifically African-American cultural referents, both historical and symbolic, to create a distinctly African-American voice and vision that, as in Baby Suggs's rituals, invoke the spiritual and imaginative power to teach and to heal.

The central ritual of healing—Sethe's "rememory" of and confrontation with her past—and the reader's ritual of healing correspond to the three sections of the novel. In part one the arrival first of Paul D then of Beloved forces Sethe to confront her past in her incompatible roles as a slave and as a mother. Moving from the fall of 1873 to the winter, the second part describes Sethe's period of atonement, during which she is enveloped by the past, isolated in her house with Beloved, who forces her to suffer over and over again all the pain and shame of the past. Finally, part three is Sethe's ritual "clearing," in which the women of the community aid her in casting out the voracious Beloved, and Sethe experiences a repetition of her scene of trauma with a difference—this time she aims her murderous hand at the white man who threatens her child.

1.1. Morrison's reconstruction of the historical text of slavery

Morrison revisions a history both spoken and written, felt and submerged. It is in the coalescence of the known and unknown elements of slavery—the events, minuscule in significance to the captors but major disruptions of black folks' experience in nurturing and loving and being— where Morrison's reconstruction of the historical text of slavery occurs. Morrison's reformulation propels a backlog of memories headlong into a postemancipation community that has been nearly spiritually incapacitated by the trauma of slavery. For Morrison's novel, what complicates the physical and psychic anguish is the reality that slavery itself defies traditional historiography. The victim's own chronicles of these events were systematically submerged, ignored, mistrusted, or superceded by "historians" of the era. This novel positions the consequences of black invisibility in both the records of slavery and the record-keeping as a situation of primary spiritual significance. Thus, the "ghostly"/"historical" presence that intrudes itself into this novel serves to belie the reportage that passes for historical records of this era as well as to reconstruct those lives into the spiritual ways that constituted the dimensions of their living. Because slavery etfectively placed black women outside of a historical universe governed by a traditional (Western) consideration of time, the aspect of their being—the quality and nature of their "state" of being—becomes a more appropriate measure of their reality. In historian Joan Kelly's essays, the exclusion of women throughout "historical time" is discussed in terms that clarify how the activities of civilization were determined by and exclusive to males. In defining a "feminist historiography" (a deconstruction of male-centered formulations of historical periods), Kelly focuses on the ways in which history is "rewritten and periodized" according to issues that affect women (6).2 In black women's writing, this deperiodization is more fully articulated because of the propensity of this literature to strategically place a detemporalized universe into the centers of their texts. Not surprisingly, black women have experienced the universe that Kelly's essays on women's history theoretically discuss. black women's experiences that explains some dimension of the strident element in the critical response to Beloved.

Memory and the imaginary (re)creation

As Toni Morrison has said, "If we don't keep in touch with the ancestor . . . we are, in fact, lost." Keeping in touch with the ancestor, she adds, is the work of a reconstructive memory: "Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was—that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way." This concern with the appearance, with the ideology of transmission, is, though, only part of the overall trajectory of her revisionary project. Eventually her work, she states, must "bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past and that which ought to be discarded." It must, that is, signify on the past and make it palatable for a present politic—eschewing that part of the past which has been constructed out of a denigrative ideology and reconstructing that part which will serve the present.

Morrison is both participant and theorist of this black aesthetic of remembering, and she has recently set out some of the mandates for establishing a form of literary theory that will truly accommodate African- American literature—a theory based on an inherited culture, an inherited "history," and the understanding of the ways that any given artistic work negotiates between those cultural/historical worlds it inhabits. Moreover, not only does Morrison, following the line of Pauline Hopkins, delineate the "dormant inmost feelings in that history"; she takes up, delicately yet resolutely, the task of reviving the very figures of that history. By taking a historical personage—a daughter of a faintly famous African-American victim of racist ideology—and constructing her as a hopeful presence in a contemporary setting, Morrison offers an introjection into the fields of revisionist historiography and fiction. She makes articulate a victim of a patriarchal order in order to criticize that order. Yet she portrays an unrelenting hopefulness in that critique. She does not inherit, as Deborah McDowell maintains some writers do, "the orthodoxy of victimage," nor does she reduce her narrative to anything resembling what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called a "master plot of victim and victimizer." She, like Ralph Ellison, returns to history not to find claims for reparation or reasons for despair, but to find "something subjective, willful, and complexly and compellingly human"—to find, that is, something for her art. She does so, moreover, by doing what Hortense Spillers claims Ishmael Reed does with the discursive field of slavery in his Flight to Canada: "constructing and reconstructing repertoires of usage out of the most painful human/historical experience." In articulating a reconstructive— critical and hopeful—feminist voice within the fields of revisionist historiography and contemporary fiction, what Morrison does is create daughters signifying history.

Sethe and the path to personal identity reconstruction

Toni Morrison also uses violence in her novel Beloved to construct the framework of the main character’s path towards self identity. The protagonist, Sethe, is revealed to the reader as a former slave and independent mother who killed her daughter, Beloved, so that she could spare her of a life of servitude. Labeled as a lunatic living in a condemned residence, Sethe is psychologically cut off from the rest of society. Even after Paul D “rids 124 of its claim to local fame” by warding off the spirit of Beloved, Sethe is still confined to a life in which the past is her constant enemy (p 45). Although rarely discussed by the novel’s characters, the violence experienced by Sethe and other former slaves remains a dominating presence throughout Sethe’s journey towards self realization. The depictions of Sethe’s experiences as an animalistic servant under schoolteacher drive her to make the ultimate sacrifice of killing her daughter; only to ensure that she is “kept away from what is terrible” (p 196). Sethe’s mentality, which is paraphrased by one literary critic as “let me destroy you before the white man does,” causes Sethe’s entire life after the event to be weighed down with the reputation of being a murderer and reckless parent figure (Tapia).  Even Sethe’s only living daughter, Denver, is scarred by her mother’s reputation. Confined to the small shred of family she has at 124, Denver never leaves the yard, and even describes the front porch steps as the “edge of the world” (p 286). The infectious quality of Sethe’s lack of true individuality and identification embodies itself in Denver, who Sethe tried to “keep away from the past that was still waiting for her” (p 51). Sethe, who is caught up in her unbearable memories of Sweet Home, is since stripped of personality and is viewed by society as a chaotic murderer. Ultimately, it is through this violence associated with her past that Sethe’s journey towards personal identity becomes clouded.

While Sethe’s path towards personal identity is obstructed by violence, it is only through an absence of violence that she is able to gain self worth as a mother. Upon Paul D’s arrival at 124, the spirit of Beloved which haunts the residence is removed, thereby symbolically cleansing the residence and Sethe of the violent memories of the past. After Paul D’s return, all seems well with Sethe and Denver, until Beloved makes her faithful return back to 124 and ultimately back into the lives of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Beloved’s return signals an opportunity for Sethe to reconcile with her past and rid herself of her identity as a crazed mother.  However, since neither Paul D nor Sethe “have reckoned with the dead or their own deadness,” Beloved’s return to 124 can only bode a collapse of what little family Sethe and Denver have left (Jesser).

Some critics have argued that the arrival of the mysterious stranger known as “Beloved” has no symbolic resemblance to Sethe’s daughter. Because Sethe and Paul D “heard the voice first – later the name,” some have argued that Beloved was bestowed spiritual qualities by the imaginations of those living at 124 (p 63). Nonetheless, it is the return of Beloved, either through imagination or a spiritual embodiment from the afterlife,  that prompts Sethe to make an attempt as sewing together the fabric of her past, thereby clearing her reputation in society as an animalistic murderer. 

As time passes, Paul D leaves 124 after learning about Sethe’s past. Although Sethe still feels that the murder of Beloved was justified, neither Paul D nor the spiritual embodiment of her daughter can bring themselves to forgive Sethe for what she did years ago. Paul D even goes as far as to tell Sethe that she has “two feet, not four,” thereby labeling Sethe’s protective act as an animalistic form of violence (p 194). Paralleled with schoolteacher’s experimentations, Sethe is given the role as an animal and servile underling, even by a man who had to live through the cruelties of Sweet Home.

After Paul D’s departure, Sethe becomes distraught over her past, and begins to devote her entire life towards pleasing Beloved. Beloved later rebukes her mother’s attempts at reconciling the past and begins to suck the very life out of 124 and its residents. Sethe and Beloved, who become “busy rationing their strength to fight each other,” are found in constant deadlock over Sethe’s past use of violence. However, after being confronted by the community, Sethe finally revitalizes her journey towards personal identity when she sees the image of schoolteacher’s arrival at 124 for the second time. As Sethe stands on her porch, she sees who she thinks is schoolteacher “coming into her yard…coming for her best thing” (p 308). It is at this point in which Sethe must make the ultimate decision: either exclude herself from the violence of her past or transgress back to the animalistic instinct she felt so many years ago when she took her daughter’s life. As Sethe “leaves Beloved behind” for the last time, she is able to finally make an escape from her past as Beloved leaves 124 for good (p 309). By abstaining from her internal instincts, Sethe is able to resist the temptation of resorting to violence. By making the decision to let her daughter go, Sethe finds herself back at 124 with Paul D by her side. Sethe, now weak from her devastating encounter with her past, is referred to by Paul D as “a best thing” (p 322). Toni Morrison goes on to conclude her novel as Sethe despondently replies “Me? Me?” to her loving companion (p 322). This act signifies Sethe’s final acceptance of a personal identity, and illustrates how Sethe’s refusal to relive the violence of the past leads to her final reconciliation with Beloved. Sethe finds a way to escape the past by disproving the reputation given to her by both schoolteacher and society altogether. By doing so, Sethe both comes to terms with her past and settles a long overdue conflict with her daughter. By ignoring the temptation to utilize violence to protect Beloved for the second time, Sethe is finally able to gain self worth and personal identity as both a mother and loving companion to Paul D.

Beloved and the metaphorical realization of death

3.1. The traces of the past and the historical persistence

Unlike much of the fiction that is characterized as “magical realism,” where spectral appearances are largely episodic, the figure of the ghost occupies a central position in Beloved. The spectral figure is not used merely as an ornamental or antirealist gesture, but instead underpins the entire narrative and its thematic structure. The ghost’s major function is to metaphorically represent the past and the way that the traces of the past persist in the present. Morrison’s focus upon the struggles of exslaves during the post–Civil War period of the “Reconstruction” is sufficient to suggest an allegorical interpretation of the ghost’s presence, as a representation of the persisting, haunting presence of slavery in the collective consciousness of Americans, and more particularly, of African Americans. However, in addition to this general idea of historical persistence, the spectral presence also transposes specific features of the history of slavery. Spectral presence is drawn out and elaborated upon, exploited for its possible associations with slavery and its position within American historical consciousness. Furthermore, Morrison’s use of the spectral figure also betrays a degree of self-reflexivity; that is to say, it reflects upon the novel’s narrative form and the way that it represents its historical concerns. In this way, it suggests a similar self-reflexive metaphoricity to that of the word “apparition” in “In a Station of the Metro.”

3.2.The self-reflexivity and its metaphorical function

The self-reflexivity of the spectral presence foregrounds its own metaphorical function in the novel, to the point where the ghost can be seen partly as a vehicle for metaphorical thought itself. As we look closely, however, we will also see that this self-reflexivity is not employed for its own sake, for the purposes of narrative sophistication and aesthetic reflexivity, but is itself determined by the novel’s engagement with the history of slavery and its inheritance. The self-reflexivity of the specter signals the novel’s metaphorical response to the problematic history of slavery. Morrison uses the self-reflexive metaphor of the spectral in order to register the crucial importance of issues of representation and interpretation to the history of slavery and to the reclamation of that history, which is the principal thematic concern of Beloved.

Beloved centers on the haunting of the occupants of “124,” a house on the outskirts of Cincinnati, in the years following the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States. Upon this basic situation, Morrison hangs various external trappings of the gothic and fantastic literary traditions, as Hélène Christol observes. Sethe, an escaped slave, and her daughter Denver occupy 124, along with the baby ghost of Denver’s older sister, whom Sethe killed as a two-year-old when her previous owner came to repossess her and her children. The full details of this crucial event, however, remain ambiguous and obscured until halfway through the narrative. As if to mirror this sustained narrative “repression,” the baby ghost that haunts is introduced in ambiguous terms in the novel’s first two sentences: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom” . This introduction is ambiguous because, if not for the more detailed description of this disembodied spite that follows, it could easily be taken as a standard metaphorical statement that captures the way that people perceive emotion as emanating from within things and places. This ambiguity is sustained, as the ghost is not referred to explicitly as a ghost until several more oblique references are made. Morrison has commented upon her ambiguous introduction of the ghost: “A few words have to be read before it is clear that 124 refers to a house . . . and a few more have to be read to discover why it is spiteful, or rather, the source of the spite.” Indeed, these evasive descriptions continue through the first few pages of the novel, even after the explicit acknowledgment of the spectral nature of this “spite.” These references are split between repeated descriptions of the ghost in terms of its own emotion and behavior, as “spite,” “fury,” and “outrage,” and attributions of agency to the house: “the house committed . . . the one insult” ; “the lively spite the house felt for them” ; “the outrageous behavior of that place”; “what the house permitted” . While it is clear that we are reading about a ghost, it is referred to as if it were the reification of externalized sentient emotion, extended in physical space.

3.3.Sethe’s revenge and the call of the consciousness

One interpretation of the character of Beloved is that she is a wrathful character looking to wreak revenge on Sethe for killing her, despite the fact that the murder was, in Sethe's mind, an entirely loving act. Sethe's guilt at Beloved's death means that she is willing to "give up her life, every minute, hour and second of it, to take back just one of Beloved's tears". The strength of Sethe’s love leads her almost to the point of death as she allows Beloved complete freedom to destroy her household and relationships; the roles of mother and daughter are completely reversed. Another interpretation of Beloved is that she is a supernatural, incarnate form of Sethe's murdered daughter.

The objective presence of Sethe’s apparitions of “rememory,” however, is undermined by the resemblance of her description to the experience of what psychologists call posttraumatic stress syndrome. Numerous critics have pointed out the affinity between Sethe’s belief in externalized memory and the experience of posttraumatic stress. This affinity suggests that Sethe’s belief in the persistence of memory is a reflection of her psychological character, rather than an accurate description of the world. Known earlier as “soldiers heart,” “shellshock,” and “battle fatigue,” it was not until after World War I that any systematic study of posttraumatic stress was undertaken. Like Sethe’s speech to Denver, Sigmund Freud’s psychological studies of posttraumatic stress attempted to explain the involuntary persistence of traumatic memory. In posttraumatic stress syndrome, memory is experienced as a persistent, haunting presence, a revisitation of the event itself. Furthermore, this experience is characterized by an externalization of the traumatic memory, a reification of it as outside the sufferer’s own mind, as an independently recurring entity in time and space. The fact that the memory returns against the subject’s wishes only reinforces his or her belief in its objective and external nature. Later, Stamp Paid reveals the story of "a girl locked up by a white man over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that's her". The concept that Beloved is the reincarnated child is supported by the fact that she is able to sing a song known only to Sethe and her children, and she speaks of Sethe's earrings without having seen them. However, the characters have a psychological need for Beloved to be that dead child returned. Sethe can assuage her guilt over the death of her child, and Denver now has a sister/ playmate. The most common interpretation of the Beloved character is that she is the spirit of Sethe's dead child and, as Denver notes, "something more." That something more is a collective spirit of all the unnamed slaves who were torn from their homes in Africa and brought to America in the cramped holds of slave ships. Beloved represents Sethe's unnamed child but also the unnamed masses that died and were forgotten. With this book, Morrison states that they are beloved as well. Perhaps Beloved is supernatural and represents the spirit of multiple people as Morrison doesn't develop her character as an individual. Beloved acts as a force rather than as a person, and wants Sethe, Denver, and Paul D to behave in certain ways and to overcome their horrific hardships. Beloved defines herself through Sethe's experiences and actions, and in the beginning, she acts as a somewhat positive force, helping the other characters to face the past and in doing so heal.

By the time the reader gets to statements such as “124 was so full of strong feeling” , it is clear that, irrespective of the actual existence of the ghost, a metaphorical relationship is being developed between the figure of the ghost and strong emotional states. In the terms of Hrushovski’s model of metaphor, we have two frames of reference here— “emotion” and “ghost”—that interact with each other and form metaphorical connections. One frame of reference is spoken about as if it were another. This is not, however, a conventional metaphorical attribution of physical presence to emotion, such as that found in Keats’s “To Hope”: “And hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom.” Paul Henle uses this line in his discussion of metaphor to show that the “enwrapping,” or figuratively suggested “cloak,” of gloom is only metaphorically presented; it is, to use Hrushovski’s phrase, “denied existence” in the projected world of the poem. In the textual world of Beloved, however, the ghost of “strong feeling” really does palpably surround things and hover within 124, occupying physical space through its manifestation as the baby ghost. The first direct descriptions of the ghost are given when Paul D first arrives at 124, and he is surprised by “a pool of red and undulating light” hovering in the doorway. Sethe assures him that the ghost is “not evil, just sad”, a judgment that is confirmed by Paul D’s physical contact with it: “She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it—dry eyed and lucky”. This first spectral appearance confirms the novel’s initial description of externalized, reified, emotion. While the presence has by now been specified as a ghost, it is still formulated in terms of emotion; even its visual appearance is described as a “kind of weeping”. Thus, while the ghost exists as an extended entity in the novel’s world, it still functions as a metaphorical presentation of the emotional intensity of the household. Indeed, Paul D feels the emotion as the very substance of the ghost. The ghost is “sad” in that sadness is the “substance” that it is composed of. In contrast to the absent “cloak” of “gloom” in Keats’s poem, here we have an example of what the Russian Formalists labeled “realization of metaphor”: the metaphor’s secondary frame of reference is posited as existing within the textual world, where it would usually only be considered present within the reader’s imagination. While the ghost is a metaphor for the perception of emotion as seemingly “external” to the mind, it is clear that it is depicted as a real, existent phenomenon within the world of Beloved.

3.4.The omnipresence of memory and the inability to imagine the future

There is a connection between Sethe’s belief in externalized memory and her somewhat futile attempts at “keeping the past at bay” , at “beating back the past” . Despite these attempts, memory keeps flooding back as if actually and uncontrollably there:

“She worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious . . . Nothing else would be in her mind . . . Nothing . . . Then something . . . and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes” (6). Sethe’s thoughts on her “rebellious brain” (70), after Paul D tells her of the last time he saw her husband, Halle, suggest a similar connection between her traumatic past, the unavoidable memory and “strong feeling” (39) she experiences and the “spite” (3) that is the baby ghost: Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can’t go back and add more . . . But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I’d love more—so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping . . . there is still more

that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that . . . But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day . . . Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she? Other people’s brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new. (70)”

While there is no direct reference to the baby ghost here, it is nevertheless evoked by Morrison’s imagery. Sethe repeatedly states that she is “full” of memories, just as 124 is filled with spectral emotion, and refers to her overloaded brain as a “greedy child.” The omnipresence of memory induces Sethe’s feeling of temporal stagnation, her inability to imagine the future, which accords with the revenant nature of the ghost. Sethe is “Loaded with the past” by recurrent memory, and so “her brain was not interested in the future” (35). Such connections between Sethe’s haunted psyche and the ghost, while giving a supporting background to the spectral manifestation, conversely undermine its independent existence in the textual world. The paragraph that begins “124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all” (39), continues the implicit connection between the ghost and Sethe’s strong emotions in a way that suggests that the ghost is merely an expression of her imagination. After describing Sethe’s dreams of her absconded sons, the paragraph proceeds to describe the memories that are evoked for her in various parts of the house and then connects this metaphorical “haunting” by memories with the actual haunting of the ghost that “fills” the house like memory: When she woke the house crowded in on her: there was the door where the soda crackers were lined up in a row; the white stairs her baby girl loved to climb; the corner where Baby Suggs mended shoes, a pile of which were still in the cold room; the exact place on the stove where Denver burned her fingers. And of course the spite of the house itself. There was no room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made.(39) The connection between Sethe’s psychological haunting and the spectral “spite of the house itself ” suggests that the “actual” haunting could be her reified memory, traumatically conceived by her as an external “foreign” agent. This is accentuated by the fact that, as we noted earlier, while the “strong feeling” does evoke the ghostly sadness, it actually refers in the passage to Sethe’s purely metaphorical “haunting” by her memories of the house, rather than the actual ghost that haunts it physically.

The hermeneutical structure of identity metaphors – “a thing as a thing”

The concept of realized metaphor is inextricably tied to the fantastic and, more specifically, is closely connected to the supernatural manifestation of the ghost. Metaphorical phrases, as many commentators have noted, are often irrational or absurd when read as literal statements. In identity metaphors, for example, a “thing” is literally presented as another “thing.” If such a phrase is rendered literal, with its illogical literal meaning realized as a description of the text’s projected “world,” it follows that the textual world will commonly take the form of the supernatural. This crossover of metaphor from a figure of speech to an ontological statement in the text breaches a rational concept of reality, because the metaphorical phrase itself is irrational, absurd, or “semantically deviant.” The potential for an irrational, supernatural textual world or event lies latent in the absurd literal meaning of most metaphorical statements.

The framework for fantastic situation

A good example of this link between the supernatural and realized metaphor can be found in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where the fantastic and absurd situation that is depicted is derived from a simple metaphor. The fantastic situation of the story, the transformation of Gregor Samsa into an unspecified form of insect-like vermin, can, as Paul Coates suggests, be read as a realization of the literal meaning of the metaphorical predication “Man is a vermin,” a phrase that is absent from the story’s discourse. In fact, Gregor Samsa’s transformation acts out the transformative “logic” of metaphor itself, where one thing is another; by virtue of language, one linguistic thing (a man, Gregor Samsa) literally “becomes” another linguistic thing (a vermin). The frame of reference, “vermin,” which in the conventional metaphorical statement is merely a hypothetical reference, becomes a full-fledged existent object in the textual world, and Gregor Samsa, as human-vermin, represents the resulting ontological conflation of the two frames of reference that are linguistically conflated in the metaphor. The realization of a fantastic situation is accomplished through the realization of a metaphor.

In his book ”The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre”, Tzvetan Todorov addresses this connection between metaphor and the supernatural. He notes the abundance of rhetorical figures in fantastic literature and the figurative origins of the fantastic in language: “The supernaturaloften appears because we take a figurative sense literally.” Todorov accordingly sees metaphor in the fantastic as not merely “an individual feature of style, but . . . a property linked to the structure of the fantastic as a genre”: The different relations we have observed between the fantastic and figurative discourse shed light on each other. If the fantastic constantly makes use of rhetorical figures, it is because it originates in them. The supernatural is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof: not only do the devil and vampires exist only in words, but language alone enables us to conceive what is always absent: the supernatural. The supernatural thereby becomes a symbol of language, just as the figures of rhetoric do.

The name and its importance in highlighting the concept of identity

Prior to gaining her freedom, Jenny Whitlow—later Baby Suggs—experiences a lack of both identity and name. A name powerfully symbolizes character and importance, yet Jenny is not sure what her name is until her son earns her freedom. A name also connotes attributes, characteristics, etc., connected with the individual. While in slavery, Jenny Whitlow answers to “anything” (167). That is, she not only does not know her name, but perceives herself as having no name. And the official title she does have—Jenny Whitlow—is a simple extension of her former master’s identity and name. Prior to being free, she has an ambiguous name for an ambiguous identity that is defined by others. Sadder still than Jenny’s lack of a significant or personalized name is the inherent futility of naming a slave. Because a name symbolizes identity, slaves have no need for names. That is, they are seen as property without identity; therefore, significant, meaningful names would not only serve to complicate matters for white slave owners, but would perhaps encourage slaves to attach significance to their own lives.

When Garner asks Baby Suggs, “Ain’t that your name? What you call yourself?” Baby Suggs replies, “Nothing…I don’t call myself nothing” (167). She has no name for herself, no concept of individual identity within the population of slaves as a whole. When she adopts the name Baby Suggs, however, she realizes both her connection to her husband and also her own strength. For, eventually, Baby Suggs—not Jenny Whitlow— becomes a respected and admired pillar in her town in Ohio. The adoption of a meaningful name allows Baby Suggs the freedom not only to love, but to operate as a strong individual within the African-American community. Another powerful passage in which Morrison addresses the significance of names is when Beloved approaches Paul D. Beloved’s request that Paul D “touch me on the inside part” is not solely sexual, she is asking for an affirmation of her individual identity, her humanity, and her importance apart from slavery. She tells Paul D, “And you have to call me my name” (137). She reiterates with a plea, “Call me my name…Please call it. I’ll go if you call it” (137). Ultimately, Beloved is representing all the slaves who lack significant names—Paul A, Paul D, Paul F, Halle, Sixo, etc. — and she asks the question each is asking. Beloved’s appeal confronts the reader not only with the power of an individual person's name, but also the pain of being denied a title. To deny one a name is to dehumanize him or her; Beloved experiences significant awakening once her identity is acknowledged. The power of a name is emphasized when Paul D complies, saying Beloved’s name, and yet Beloved does not leave. Instead she “moved closer,” for the significance of hearing her own name is too powerful, too humanizing, and Beloved does not want to leave the place where her identity is affirmed (137). One overarching theme in Toni Morrison’s Beloved concerns the significance of names among slaves. This theme develops in two primary passages; and after reading such passages, and seeing the struggles of both Baby Suggs and Beloved, the reader appreciates the significance of names in Morrison’s Beloved.

The absenting presence marked by slavery

The novel uses the substantializing impulse inherent to both the specter and metaphor to

reclaim the immense absence and loss that marks the history of slavery. As suggested in our examination of “In a Station of the Metro,” the spectral figure is not just an absence made present but is also a disappearing figure, liable to fade away or vanish once perceived and to be subsequently denied as merely a hallucination. In this chapter I want to follow this distinction and, in contrast to the previous chapter’s concentration on the attribution of form to absence, examine the active reduction, suspension, and erasure of already posited reference or presence. While this distinction between absence and erasure may appear abstract and while Morrison intentionally conflates different senses of negation and absence into an overwhelming impression of negativity, it will become clear that these two different registers of the negative serve quite different purposes in the wider thematic framework of the novel. Drawing out the distinct

senses in the localized depiction of the ghost will reveal their particular force and application in the wider context of the narrative and its historical project.

The disappearance of Beloved that concludes the novel is the most obvious episode of spectral negation and denial. This disappearance, and especially its elaboration in the two-page coda, is the novel’s most explicit development of the dialectic of absence and presence as it is manifested

by the spectral figure. Beloved disappears in the climactic confrontation scene (257–262) involving the inhabitants of 124, the black women of Cincinnati, and the house’s owner, Mr. Bodwin. Morrison does not directly describe the actual disappearance, but breaks off the chapter at the point where Beloved sees Bodwin “rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her” (262). Beloved’s disappearance is instead relayed through second-hand accounts, which are delivered after the fact and exploit the confusion surrounding the confrontation at 124:

“Here boy, feeble and shedding his coat in patches, is asleep by the pump, so Paul D knows Beloved is truly gone. Disappeared, some say, exploded right before their eyes. Ella is not so sure. “Maybe,” she says, “maybe not. Could be hiding in the trees waiting for another chance.” But when Paul D sees the ancient dog, eighteen years if a day, he is certain 124 is clear of her.”

The return of the old dog appears to confirm the supernatural nature of Beloved’s disappearance, in keeping with traditional beliefs regarding animals’ perception of the supernatural.1 However, the phrase “some say” suggests that this supernaturalism is uncertain and subject to conjecture. That she has vanished is clear, as Paul D’s thoughts attest, “One point of agreement is: first they saw it and then they didn’t. When they got Sethe down on the ground and the ice pick out of her hands and looked back to the house, it was gone” (267). There are, however, suggestions that she simply fled when everyone was distracted in the tumult: “Later, a little boy put it out how he . . . saw, cutting through the woods, a naked woman with fish for hair” (267). Beloved’s disappearance, even more so than the rest of the novel, is focused through the perceptions, thoughts, and reports of other characters, thereby casting doubt on its reliability.

Although the novel’s conclusion appears to belatedly admit that Beloved was simply a collective hallucination, an epiphenomenal product of others’ minds and perceptions, this is by no means an unequivocal reading. In fact, not only her existence but also her negation is rendered

provisional in the coda. So far, we have documented the way that the coda conflates denial and erasure, picturing an effective denial of an imagined presence. However, there are suggestions that Beloved’s denial is a futile, or largely ineffective, attempt at eradicating a presence merely by refusing to recognize it. One important complication that resists the unequivocal reduction of Beloved to a hallucination is that, as we have observed, the consciousness that supposedly creates and perceives the specter is collective. While the possibility of collective hallucination cannot be ruled out, it is difficult to discount the problems this would present given the preceding narrative, where she is pictured as an independent character, apparently interacting objectively with the other characters. The reader has by this time got to the end of a novel centered

on what is a strikingly independent “hallucination.” Hence, the coda’s suggestion that such a hitherto independent character is only a hallucination strikes the reader as a rather belated denial after the fact, a rationalization rather than a strong ontological claim. In any case, if a

hallucination, she appears to be one that transcends what is conventionally meant by that word, as she entails some external ontological dimension. As Neil Cornwell observes, if “Beloved were to have been hallucinated into ‘reality’ by Sethe, the ontological problem posed would

be no less severe than were she to have been a ghost.”

The narrator’s intimation that the community’s perspective is subjective and unreliable also indicates that their denial of Beloved’s existence is not to be trusted. We read that “those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her,” forget her, “until they realized they

couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all” (274). The phrase “began to believe” implies that their belief in Beloved’s nonexistence is not necessarily true, that it is actually a rationalization of their failing memories of her disturbing presence. Here,

the air of conjecture and suspicion that surrounds Beloved does not just render her existence uncertain, but also her supposed nonexistence. Her denial is subject to the same uncertainty as her presence is, being filtered through her perceivers’ beliefs and rationalizations.

The uncertainty and unreliability of Beloved’s denial is further confirmed by the coda’s hints that her presence persists, albeit in a more diffused form:

”So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do.”

This passage suggests that a trace of Beloved’s presence persists in an altered form even though she is denied and neglected by those who supposedly hallucinate her into being. This passage describes clear attempts at rationalizing a persisting presence as merely imagined, like “an unpleasant dream,” but suggests that such attempts are unreliable. The qualifying word “seem” hints at this unreliability, much as the phrase “began to believe” does in the preceding paragraph. The fact that the “knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep” only “seem to belong to the sleeper” (my emphasis) implies that they actually belong to someone other than

“the sleeper.” The implication here is that, despite denial and rationalization, a trace of Beloved remains as a feeling of unease.

Experience and identity in Beloved. The possibility of a theoretical understanding of social and cultural identity

As Satya Mohanty considers, ”whether we inherit an identity – masculinity, being black – or we actively choose one on the basis of our political predilections – radical lesbianism, black nationalism, socialism – our identities are ways of making sense of our experiences”. Going further, identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways. It is in this sense that they are valuable, and their epistemic status should be taken very seriously. In them, and through them, we learn to define and reshape our values and our commitments, we give texture and form to our collective futures. Both the essentialism of identity politics and the skepticism of the postmodernist position seriously underread the real epistemic and political complexities of our social and cultural identities.

For both Sethe and Paul, reclaiming community involves personal growth in their rational and affective capacities to deal with their traumatic pasts. In psychoanalytic terms, the novel traces their developing ability to "work through" the implications of their complex cathectic relationships with Sweet Home and everything that followed. In the early chapters both characters reveal a deep resistance to confronting their pasts on any level, which is manifested in their inability to narrate their own personal stories by themselves. If for Sethe surviving was predicated on "keeping the past at bay" (42), keeping it from forming a coherent narrative with the present and the future, the attempt to construct and narrate the story together with Paul can succeed only if the past ceases to be a form of uncontrolled repetition, "acted out" by the subject rather than integrated cognitively and affectively into her life. Even when it is successful, the narrating is at best fitful and uneasy; "working through" the traumatizing past involves dealing with the way it effectively arrests one's agency: "[Sethe] was spinning. Round and round the room. Past the jelly cupboard, past the window, past the front door, another window, the sideboard, the keeping-room door, the dry sink, the stove-back to the jelly cupboard. Paul D sat at the table watching her drift into view then disappear behind his back, turning like a slow but steady wheel. . . .[T]he wheel never stopped" (159). To go beyond this image of motion and energy without real movement, Sethe has to integrate more fully into her emotional life the theoretical knowledge she both has and resists: if her past is not just hers alone, she can regain its meaning only through collective effort-with Paul, with Denver and Beloved. Her anxieties about trusting, herself as well as others, cannot be resolved at a purely intellectual level. Morrison indicates in several ways why historical memory might be available to human subjects only if we expand our notion of personal experience to refer to ways of both feeling and knowing, and to include collectives as well as individual selves. The braiding and fusing of voices and emotions makes possible the new knowledge we seek about our postcolonial condition. That it does is evident even more clearly in the searching, exploratory quality of the chant of the black women who at the end help Sethe exorcise the ghost, searching for something that is, once again, both the stuff of history and a new knowledge: "When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice into chunks. . . When the music entered the window, she was wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved's forehead. . . . Sethe opened the door and reached for Beloved's hand. Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash" (261). The dense allusions in the images bring to mind the varieties of ways people join to transcend their present condition, to recreate past and future through an act of collective imagination and will. And this act is something one learns; one searches for the knowledge to be able to do it right. Images of water evoke both the unremembered dead of the Middle Passage and the power of giving birth; the Clearing brings to mind the collective healing ritual presided over by Sethe's dead mother in law, the ritual that makes possible the communal life of the survivors of slavery. In every instance the collective effort produces something new, the fusion of voices (the call and response, the braiding of sounds that breaks the back of words) leads to possibilites that could not have been created by the effort of an individual by herself.

Conclusions

The goal of this study was to bring connect concepts like identity, loss of identity under slavery and the reconstruction of the self, all of them gathered into a remarkable novel byToni Morrison. From my critical point of view, the interes to memory as possibility of personal reconstruction that Toni Morrison insists on is the clue for finding the path to an authentic hermeneutics of this novel. Memory, history and importance of self-consciousness as authentic possibilities for the reconstruction of personal identity are the key – moments into the argument that the loss of identity is, surprisingly, a stage of the development of the historical subject, totally necessary, from a Heideggerian perspective. Toni Morrison makes use of an impressive array of literary techniques to evoke the reader’s expectations of the true character of Beloved. It is a story encompassing levels of past, from the slave ship to Sweet home, as well as the present. Sometimes the past is told in flashbacks, sometimes in stories, and sometimes it is plainly told, as if it were happening in the present. Morrison's evocative blend of detail, memory, and lyrical commentary forms a liquid stream that carries the reader along the intriguing tale.

The mesmerizing skill with which Morrison spins her tale lures the reader along with nuggets of fact—a date, an event, a motive—until the story jells in spite of the veiled meanings of the speaker's truths, half-truths, and suppositions. The use of Biblical allusions and much ambiguous symbolism creates an atmosphere riddled with force and drama. The structure of the work is compounded with an ever-switching point of view. Every character, even the dead ones and half-alive ones, tell parts of the tale. The diversity of the point of view creates a tapestry of people who interact-individuals joined by past or present into a community.

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