Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4

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Contesting Boundaries in Toni Morrion's Beloved / Will Cunningham

Keywords Geography, Literature, Place and Space

<1> Toni Morrison dedicates Beloved to the "Sixty Million and more" captured, displaced, and murdered Africans whose physical lives and cultural identity were terminated amidst the transatlantic slave trade. Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the story of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence - a complex, industrial and capitalistic endeavor that specifically targeted black identity. The belly of the slave ship, an image invoked in Beloved's monologue, is a precursor to more familiar, albeit less violent, modern spaces that might be demarcated as placeless: international airport terminals and borders, refugee camps, and military detention prisons. These locations all occupy that liminal space betwixt and between opposing binaries: this space is the borderland, the indefinable, a temporary and fluctuating zone governed by both regulatory and lawless forces. The slave ship was the first in a long line of spaces that the sixty million and more occupied. The plantation, the big house, the slave quarters, and the auction block were all locations where to varying degrees, as Katherine McKittrick notes, white hegemonic systems "situate black people and places outside modernity" (949). These were the locales where enslaved blacks were kept "in place" by virtue of legal and cultural placelessness. But space is never a totally abstracted, passive, or static loci - especially a borderland space. [1] Even amidst a landscape where identity is uprooted, the processes of re-visioning and remembering invoke the spatiality of the borderland, which simultaneously houses counter-hegemonic forms of agency. This tension between a space created by the material manifestations of power and the performances of identity within and through these movements of capital reveals an acute, revelatory convergence of spatial and racial identity formation.

<2> Cultural geographers have long recognized the fluid nature of space, and recent scholarship has begun to make connections between the ways in which space is organized along racial differentiation (and vice-versa). Morrison's acute attention to spatial construction in Beloved follows the general outline offered by Brooke Neely and Michelle Samura's in "Social Geographies of Race: Connecting Race and Space." Neely and Samura note that specifically racialized moments involved in identity and subject formation also actively create and recreate the spaces inhabited by singular and collective identities. By drawing on both the fields of spatial and critical race theory, Neely and Samura articulate a theory whereby the social constructedness of space overlaps in key areas with the production of racial identities. This overlap is characterized by four tenets that signify the ways in which racial difference and struggles of inequality are spatially organized and enacted. A summary of these four tenets are as follows: (1) Space and race are contested places where conflict, confrontation, and subversion are enacted in a struggle for both resources and subjective identity formation; (2) Space and race are not essentialized units; rather, they are fluid, historical, and performative; (3) Space and race are interactional and relational in such a way that individuals, groups, and institutions create and disrupt spatial processes; and (4) Space and race are defined by inequality and difference, with dominant interests groups regulating and defining both spaces and racial constructions.

<3> Neely and Samura's theory allows critics a more precise way of understanding the implications of racial formation within and through spatial constructs. [2] Especially within the context of nineteenth century America, during which Morrison's novel is set, spaces are often naturalized through constant economic and social forces, creating an illusion of spatial stability and coherence. The key to understand the link between race and space is locating the point of meeting between the seemingly naturalized, exclusionary forces of whiteness and that which it intends to regulate (in this case, "othered" races; these borders are also imminently visible along sexual and gender lines). At this point of meeting, a specific space acts as a palimpsestic archive [3] of social and political processes which have composed the formation of racial identity - an archive often characterized by oppressive, hegemonic forces of whiteness and an erasure of blackness. It is in these spaces that racial processes stake claims and create an organized social order. These spaces often take the form of a boundary and, during the moment(s) of contestation, become hybrid places with permeable borders. It is when this binary is obfuscated, blurred, or otherwise transgressed that we see the implications of a spatialized reading of race.

<4> A spatialized reading of race and identity formation in a literary text requires a bit of maneuvering: a text is itself a unique space capable of producing culture within its own boundaries. In the introduction to Place and the Politics of Identity, Michael Keith and Steve Pile, drawing on the work of Laclau, note that "identity is always an incomplete process. At times, in order to make sense of a particular moment of a particular place, this process is stopped to reveal an identity that is akin to a freeze-frame photograph" (28). When one reveals the formation of identity construction within a text, one is doing exactly that: removing an arbitrary snapshot of identity, taking it out of its given context, handling it, and then returning it to its original state of fluidity. And because racialized processes are always also spatialized in some fashion, this is a double-stopping - a freezing of both a fluid space and a fluid construction of identity. Referencing Bachelard in Spatiality, Robert Tally also draws attention to this phenomenon, noting that "the experience of time is actually frozen in discrete moments in our memory, photographic or spatial arrangements, such that space assumes a greater importance than a temporality that is no longer understood in terms of a fluvial metaphor" (116). These frozen moments of time that take on spatial arrangements become imminently visible in the lived experiences and constant "rememory" of Beloved. One cannot lift just any moment in which we find Sethe at 124 Bluestone in order to comment on her own sense of identity without considering at which point in time she is existing within that space: to do so, for example, would arbitrarily ignore both the denigration of the house as communal space as well as her own understanding of herself as a mother, lover, protector, and victim. Another more explicit example of the problematic nature of "freezing" time occurs when Stamp Paid shows Paul D the sketching of Sethe in the Newspaper. This picture ostensibly freezes Sethe's image in a moment of criminality, constructing her identity upon one act, ignoring and even erasing all other aspects of her lived experience. Unlike the townspeople who invariably and condemningly constructed a static representation of Sethe after viewing this picture, it is only with the immense awareness of the fluid and historical nature of race and space that critics should draw on these snapshots. We must acknowledge that the process of identity formation is just that: a process - and that only in considering the totality of a litany of these snapshots may we draw a somewhat definable and definite reading of both space and race.

<5> "Totality" also invokes the second bit of maneuvering required when performing a racialized reading of space in a literary text: one must consider the issue of scale. To speak of the local without acknowledgement of the national and global is to ignore the totality of spatial processes involved in racial identification. David Delaney, referencing Morrison's Playing in the Dark, notes this in his essay "The Space That Race Makes" by arguing that there is no outside [4] to racial geography (7). Delaney posits that a black person cannot construct identity only within a singular locality outside the framework of national consciousness. I began this essay with Morrison's invocation of the sixty million who died in the transatlantic slave trade: an invocation that addresses the national scale of space. Beloved begins with a displacement in Africa and a removal from spatial origins. Thus, when one speaks of "home" in the text, it is always within the context of not-home (and the literary cartography of the actual narrative has a way of echoing this - because the narrative drifts between perspective, time, and voice, the reader seldom feels "at home" when reading). Local spaces work within communal spaces, communal within national, national within global; yet the national and global invade the individual and the local. It is a convergence theory, where spatial centers are destabilized, contested, and heterogeneous.

<6> Scholars of Beloved have nearly exhaustively analyzed the relationship between the communal and the individual in identity formation, though not explicitly from a spatial perspective. However, this seemingly local relationship takes on much larger proportions when scaled upwards to consider the possibility of the formation of a national black identity. I will begin my reading of Beloved, then, by considering the broader relationship between national spatial organization, the crossing of (national) borders, and a black sense of place. Typical readings of place tend to focus on esoteric, bounded, small-scale representations of local space. These localized spaces are seen as static, frozen in time, and lacking referentiality to national political and social processes. With the exception of The Clearing, which acts as a sacred space - an entirely different kind of space - even the seemingly local spaces in Beloved belie this assertion of space by constantly invoking both legal and social apparatuses meant to govern an entire population. For example, while 124 Bluestone might at first seem like a place quarantined from outsiders, it acts as a major crossroad for both black and white culture, constantly at the center of communal gatherings, white intrusion, and commerce. However, the space I will focus on that demonstrates a racial spatiality on a national scale in the novel is the Ohio River and its tributaries and canals. While Sethe's journey to and across the river anchors this analysis, her encounter only signifies on a much larger space whose archive of social and economic participants seeps into the entire narrative of the novel.

<7> The Ohio River and its tributaries is a fluid space that nearly every character in the novel must engage, traverse, or cross over. This near exhaustive engagement with the River establishes this space as a hub for national flows of commerce and human capital. When Mr. Garner takes Baby Suggs across the Ohio River and into Cincinnati, he proclaims that "this is a city of water…Everything travels by water and what the rivers can't carry the canals take" (142). Paul D, much later in the narrative time-scale, decides, among other reasons, to stay in Cincinnati because during the winter it "reassumed its status of slaughter and riverboat capital" and "all a Negro had to do was show up and there was work: poking, killing, cutting, skinning, case packing and saving offal" (155). Mr. Garner and Paul D's similar pronouncements, albeit from drastically different perspectives, echoe the sentiment of the prominent political geographer, Edward Soja, who notes that the "geography and history of capitalism intersect in a complex social process which creates a constantly evolving historical sequence of spatialities" (127). Cincinnati, connected to the Ohio River by a complex web of canals, was socially partitioned according to economic precedence. And while Paul D's observation that jobs were abundant even for the socially marginalized demonstrates that progress, development, and the building of a nation represents a potential route for upward mobility in the black community, Patricia Price reminds us that "geographers have long worked with concepts of inclusion and exclusion to contend that what, and who, is socially valued enjoys a presence in the landscape while that and those who are devalued are kept out of sight" (153). This dynamic echoes Neely and Samura's theory as well, as the links to the city - the canals - represent a fluid network of capitalistic commerce that partitioned racial groups along unequal social and economic lines. In fact, even though 124 Bluestone feels relatively removed from the city limits of Cincinnati, it is actually close enough that the inhabitants could smell the detritus of capitalism: when the thirty women decided to travel to 124 Bluestone in order to exorcise Beloved from the premise, the narrator notes that "wet and hot Cincinnati's stench had traveled to the country: from the canal, from hanging meat and things rotting in jars, from small animals dead in the fields, town sewers and factories" (258). This dynamic, this feeling of closeness-yet-removal, this "keeping out of sight" yet near enough on the downwind side to smell the stench, captures the essence of this border zone. For while 124 Bluestone, its inhabitants, and its neighbors might appear to be removed from the process of city-building and empire, they are actually at work within it establishing a new and engaging social space.

<8> The Ohio River, though, was also the site of much more explicit racial contestation, and at this point our gaze has only looked North to Cincinnati. The full context of this space can only be realized when one turns his or her gaze to the South, when one looks at this space in its totality. While Price notes that the "devalued are kept out of sight," one also sees within the devalued community a subversive enterprise willingly bent on keeping themselves out of sight. In fact, the very naming of this enterprise, the Underground Railroad, invokes this hidden spatiality. When Sethe encounters the Ohio River as she flees Sweet Home plantation, she finds herself amidst a space of national contestation as well as local subversion. The hybridity of this space reflect on both an oppressive whiteness and the act of re-visioning and remembering - the narrative of the oppressed - which is the home of counter-hegemonic practices.

<9> The duality of this meridian converges with the identity of nearly every character that encounters it. When Paul D contemplates the ethical quandary of removing Beloved from 124 Bluestone, he thinks of the "territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will" (66, emphasis added). And while Sethe was "looking at one mile of dark water" before crossing from Kentucky to Ohio, the narrator observes that the "current [was] dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away" (83). The Ohio River, even as it creates the physical boundary between self-actualization and enslavement, is imbued with the fears of the oppressed and the signs of the oppressors. It invokes the immediate fear of the Klan, yet the importance of a current dedicated to the Mississippi promises perhaps even greater fear - the fear of being sold "down the river" to the deep south, a place both physically further away from freedom as well as notorious for housing the utter extremities of horrific slavery practices (if such a distinction can even be made). [5] It is in this moment, however, when Sethe stands facing this doubling of fear, that we see most explicitly the signs of a national space of racial identity and uplift [6], because to Sethe, this view "looked like home" (83). In this moment, Sethe stands at a bifurcated precipice: on one side is a home, a place of belonging; on the other hand is the Freudian uncanny - an unheimlich horror of closed spaces and unrequited trauma.

<10> However, when Sethe engages in the act of crossing the river, she enters into the borderland. After Amy leaves her on the riverbank, she encounters two boys and an older man, Stamp Paid, and "begged him for water and he gave her some of the Ohio in a jar. Sethe drank it all and begged more" (90). In this moment, Sethe ingests all that the river connotes: she takes the fear of the Klan as a part of her being, willfully entering a space that is marked by contestation and fluidity. That Sethe vigorously ingests water from a place so marked by hybridity, immediately before crossing that water, only to enter a city defined by water, demonstrates the fluid, historical, and performative nature of the confluence of space and race. McKittrick expands this idea in "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place" by defining a black sense of place "as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter" (949). One such way that Sethe performs this process of struggle is through her engagement with Stamp Paid as they cross the river. The narrator describes their journey as a surprise to Sethe: "contrary to what she expected they poled upriver, far away from the rowboat Amy had found. Just when she thought he was taking her back to Kentucky, he turned the flatbed and crossed the Ohio like a shot" before leaving her on the riverbank (91). Later, a woman sent to find her proclaims that she "saw the sign a while ago […] Stamp leaves the old sty open when there's a crossing. Knots a white rag on the post if it's a child too" (91). Sethe benefits directly from practices that had developed outside the official tenets of mainstream cartography. McKittrick notes that "fugitive and maroon maps, literacy maps, food-nourishment maps, family maps, [and] music maps" signified an alternative way of demarcating spaces among oppressed black people in the Americas. This alternative practice of mapping is seen variously throughout the text: Sixo's many nightly journeys guided by the stars, the plan to leave Sweet Home when the corn stalks were high, and Paul D following the cherry blossoms North from Georgia to freedom. [7] The prominent cartographic historian J.B. Harley has long noted the power-implications of cartographic practices, arguing that the very production of maps is an assertion of power and is embedded in a specific system of knowledge (286). These alternative maps, ostensibly ignoring the Cartesian coordinate system of imperial map-making practices, route social action and agency through a subversive spatial matrix that can only be interpreted by those who have been implicated in a subversive identity. These mapmaking processes, rather than disrupting the time-space continuum, as is often the case with the Cartesian methodology, demonstrate an acute understanding of the appropriation of the natural world into images and signs that reflect both an assertion of power and the subversion of the naturalizing power of maps produced largely by white men.

<11> But while Sethe's "heart started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River" (147), her crossing signifies on more than one individual's identity; rather, her individual encounter stands proxy for the experiences of countless other enslaved Africans bent on achieving self-actualization. Only hours before Sethe crossed the river and moments after giving birth, the narrator steps away from the immediate scene of mother-child-white woman and describes the physical texture of their surrounding in what can only be taken as a grand metaphor for the potential of existing within a border space:

Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river's edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects - but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for a moment it is easy to believe each one has one - will become all what is contained in the spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that; longer, perhaps, than the spore itself. (84)

It is not explicitly clear whether Sethe and Amy are consciously aware of the "shower of silvery blue" hovering about them (84), which lends even further to a reading which places this metaphor on a national scale rather than an individual. Sethe and Amy, even while existing in a space that is embroiled in contestation and danger, are able to rest - find peace, even. It is by existing in a liminal, incoherent space where certainty is not guaranteed yet hope exists for future generations that Sethe and others before her develop a national black sense of place and belonging. However, Sethe's identity is in no way fully realized in this act of crossing and engagement with a hybrid space - for the earlier trauma of her physical and psychic abuse at the hands of Schoolteacher never fully escapes her. Nevertheless, her life outside Sweet Home is marked by engagement with other contested space that continue to reflect on her racial identity and sense of self - namely 124 Bluestone and The Clearing. But her act of crossing is clearly a contestation of her racial identity as it confronts the established, historical narrative that has, to this point, defined her identity in terms that were ubiquitously marked by institutional and legal inequality. It is in this crossing that she enters a space that grants a more realistic opportunity to further define herself apart from and against the violence of whiteness.

<12> If Sethe's act of crossing the Ohio River works within a national perspective on a black sense of place, then her subsequent movement into 124 Bluestone and the various spaces associated with the surrounding community offers a more localized portrait of black spaces. It should be noted, though, that these local spaces are always and at once subsumed within this national backdrop: the contestation of the local and of the home was being enacted all across the borders between slavery and freedom. These spaces share the common ground of confronting and living within white violence even under the guise of legal freedom and, as noted previously, even in a seemingly safe environment, the national is oft to invade: one only has to look at the tenets of the Fugitive Slave Act and Schoolteacher's willingness to transgress the boundary between slavery and freedom to realize that a black sense of place and home were constantly in danger. The safe confines of community and individual identity were perched precariously on laws that bypassed both cartographic and social boundaries. Thus, when Sethe leaves the riverside and moves into 124 Bluestone, she is not moving out of the border zone; rather, she moves further in. That borderland expands from its most central site of contestation, the Ohio River, to the outworkings of a more fully realized black community.

<13> That 124 Bluestone still represents a borderland is most prescient within a capitalistic framework: it is easy to forget that Sethe and Baby Suggs never own 124 Bluestone and only exist there as tenants. The Bodwins only seem to act as bookends to any narrative that involves the house and are relatively forgotten until the culminating scene on the front porch. But this framework is important, as it continues to reinforce the borderland space that is 124 Bluestone. If Neely and Samura's theory holds true, that space and race are defined by inequality and difference and that dominant interest groups will continually regulate and define spatial construction, then the importance of the home's ownership should remain at the forefront of any critique of the process of identity formation. It is within this capitalistic, contractual confine that the novel's primary living space defines itself as an ulterior, organic space of human development and interaction. In "'Black and 'Cause I'm Black I'm Blue': transverse racial geographies in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye," McKittrick notes, in reference to another border space in Morrison's oeuvre, that "consumerism, uneven development, thwarted opportunities and (in)consistent possibilities all demonstrate how the black community in Lorain moves through, against, and within a capitalistic framework" (130). This space in The Bluest Eye mirrors the development of the home space in Beloved. For example, the novel begins with a portrait of 124 Bluestone, but the house "didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far" (1). The house only stood as an emblem of the Bodwin's "goodwill" towards Baby Suggs and did not yet have enough value to be assigned a postal code. But the house's eventual address, 124, developed alongside its occupants and is as much a demarcation of Sethe's family unit and the missing third child as a numerical marker for a physical place. The house's naming and outward identity comes only after being inhabited by Baby Suggs and Sethe.

<14> The move from the global to the local and, more specifically, these lived-in spaces, provides a glimpse of the lived experiences of black identity within the border - experiences that often demonstrate an acute struggle against cultural and social hegemony. Part of the contractual agreement between Baby Suggs and the Bodwins was that "she was clean" (145) and that cleanliness would reflect itself in the maintenance of the house - a house that was bereft of color upon her arrival (1). The transformation from a whitewashed, stark home bereft of identity is perhaps most explicitly seen as Sethe remembers Baby Suggs on her deathbed. Baby Suggs was "starved for color" in 124 - an odd signifier of someone's identity. But taken within the context of racialized space, it seems all too fitting. Sethe notes that "there wasn't any [color] except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, the curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool" (38). Upon this act of re-memory (which, as noted previously, is the narrative of the oppressed in space), Sethe becomes "as color conscious as a hen" and purposely fills the void of the white-washed house with bright and vibrant colors - the space of 124 Bluestone, in direct contestation with the wishes of the Bodwins, takes on the colors and hues of its inhabitants.

<15> 124 Bluestone acts as the primary anchoring space of identity for multiple individuals in Beloved. Beloved, after Denver fears she has left, exclaims "I don't want that place. This is the place I am" (123) and Sethe, after Paul D queries why she doesn't leave 124 Bluestone, mentally notes that "this house he told her to leave as though a house was a little thing - a shirtwaist or a sewing basket you could walk off from or give away any old time. She who had never had one but this one" (22). Sethe, Beloved, Paul D, and Baby Suggs all experience a strong bond to that place even without outright ownership. But 124 Bluestone acts as more than an isolated space for individuals to create an identity; rather, the home is created through an amalgamation of multiple identities and serves as a "way station" for the entire community (249). Critics have long noted this communal aspect of the home and its implications on identity formation, so beleaguering this point seems unnecessary. [8] However, what is noteworthy is the way in which the community becomes fractured over the contestation of this home only to come together at the end. Within the border zone, contestation does not just occur between opposing forces; rather, this contestation is scaled down to encapsulate even like-identities as representatives of those living within this border.

<16> The fracturing of the community over 124 Bluestone as a communal gathering place works outward from the fracturing of the house as space. Baby Suggs notes that there is "not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief" (5), and this sentiment is extrapolated to its most extreme degree with 124 Bluestone. Neely and Samura's theory of the confluence of space and race accounts for this fracturing in quite remarkable ways. The house represents the fluidity of space both in who might call it home at any given point as well as the unstable physicality of the house. The house "braced" and the floorboards "were grinding" and "the house itself was pitching" (15, 18). But space is also "interactional and relational" where "social actors…create, disrupt, and recreate spatial meanings through interaction with one another" (Neely & Samura 7). Because 124 Bluestone is the embodiment of fluidity, the extremities to which both individuals and the community go in order to respond to the home demonstrates the active, relational development of identity.

<17> This relationship between space and race is perhaps no more clearly seen than in the conversation between Denver and Sethe concerning Sweet Home. Sethe warns Denver of the dangers of remembering certain places that stand outside of the time-space continuum. I will quote the passage at length because it not only demonstrates the ultimate power of rememory and place, but also serves as the antithesis to the Clearing:

Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, its gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world…its when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm - every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there - you who never was there - if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. (36).

Sethe's memory is explicitly imbricated with Sweet Home - the place that "wasn't sweet and sure wasn't home" (14). Sethe's concern for Denver, that some places never disappear and wield a real and present threat of trauma, demonstrates the historical, relational weight of space in identity formation. But just as Sweet Home seems to possess an identity of its own, Sethe and all those associated with 124 - and most notably Baby Suggs - discover an alternative to Sweet Home plantation in the Clearing. Sweet Home and the Clearing represent spaces that transcend dimensionality - they cannot be destroyed or forgotten by the simple act of leaving or the progression of linear time. They exist as real places as well as symbolic retreats and prisons of the mind. With these two spaces in particular, the past collides with the present and into the corporeal.

<18> Against the backdrop of Sweet Home, a place where black identity was collectively and systematically undermined, the Clearing acts as a space within the border that is capable of housing individual self-expression. But perhaps more importantly, the black inhabitants of Cincinnati can retreat to the Clearing as a space without a collective, historical memory: the Clearing was a "wide open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place" (87). The lingering impact of the trauma of Sweet Home (and other "Sweet Home's") is obfuscated. It is a clear and empty space, housing only that which Baby Suggs and her congregation bring into it. And while Baby Suggs leads the convoy into this sacred space, her message is one of individual expression: while the children laughed and the men and women danced and cried, Baby Suggs reminds them that "the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine" (88). This sacred space, at the heart of the borderland, is where Sethe "claimed herself" (95) and gave definition to an identity that heretofore had been the subject of the hegemonic, scrupulous pen of white men.

<19> That Sethe continues to embody previous spaces - namely, Sweet Home - further implicates the significance of the Clearing as a seminal realm of identity formation. If space is the accruing of historical and physically lived experiences, then Sethe's revisitation to the Clearing with Denver and Beloved should reify this concept - but it doesn't. Conspicuously missing from the individual and collective rememory of the black community that visits the Clearing is the trauma of slavery. For example, before this visit with her two daughters, Sethe expresses a desire "to be there now. At the least to listen to the spaces that the long-ago singing had left behind" (89). For while Sethe determines to go to the Clearing "to pay tribute to Halle" (89), she does not experience the paralysis of trauma associated with her rape in the barn with Halle watching on. In fact, the physical pain inflicted on her by Beloved in the Clearing is transformed into an erotic event. And as Sethe and the girls leave the Clearing, "Sethe was bothered…[and was] reminded of something" but Sethe cannot find the root of that troubling memory - it "slipped her mind" (98). In a text replete with the act of remembering as a signifier of past experiences with lived-in space, the Clearing offers the only example of a space that mutes past traumatic memories - effectively transforming them into something else entirely. Those that experience the Clearing only seem to remember their previous experiences within the Clearing. The Clearing compresses time, even in some cases completely annihilating it. It becomes the space where memory collides with the presence and provides a clear spatial organization for the future.

<20> The Clearing - and Beloved as a whole - perhaps reflects most clearly on what Foucault has described as a proverbial "changing of the guard" in literary theory. Foucault observes that the "great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle…The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed" (22). Writing in the twentieth century about the lived experiences of nineteenth-century enslaved Africans, Morrison's Beloved echoes this juxtaposition. The characters experience the past in the present, relive trauma and yet move beyond it as they engage new spaces. Morrison's text maps this convolution of memory and experience and the time-space continuum. By its spatial organization, Beloved "helps readers get a sense of the worlds in which others have lived, currently live, or will live in times to come" (Tally 2). This "sense of the world," beginning with the production of space through the displacement of human bodies in a slave ship, is deeply implicated in the processes of capitalism. David Harvey argues that the ability to influence the production of space is a means of augmenting social power - and that those who can affect the spatial distribution of wealth, physical and social infrastructures, or political and economic processes often stand to gain a certain measure of power (233). This capitalist process begins, for enslaved Africans, by the formation of spatial barriers. It is extrapolated into issues of power and ownership - both of self and of material affects. And even now, as Tally, notes, this phenomenon allows us to see these processes in the spaces we inhabit: one only has to look at virtually any urban, American city to witness a gross spatial imbalance of power through redlining, urban ghettos, and meandering school district lines.

<21> But as black individuals crossed the border from slavery to freedom, new spaces were created that housed the memories of past places and the prospect of defining oneself over and against the definers. These spaces represent a middle ground and a new consciousness that imbricates the political, historical, and social into a fully realized identity. This simultaneously ambiguous yet imminently physical borderland is, amidst a looming danger, a hopeful place with the potential for joy and self-actualization, as demonstrated in the narrator's brief reprieve on the banks of the Ohio river. Reading the confluence of space and race allows us to see in Morrison's work a critical mass of dispossessed humanity embroiled in constant relations of subversion and contestation. Beloved serves many purposes, both within critical, literary fields and within the popular consciousness of America and beyond; however, at the heart of the novel is an interrogation of how individuals navigate - and remember - the spaces they inhabit.

Notes

[1] Sometimes referred to as "thirdspace" by cultural geographers, most notably in the work of Edward Soja. For the purpose of this paper, because real, physical borders always loom imminently, "borderland" becomes the most appropriate term in all its evocations.

[2] What actually constitutes "spatial constructs" or "spatiality" in general is a much-debated topic and is often reduced to differentiating between two terms: space and place. As a point of clarity, and without unnecessarily delving too far into this discourse, I will generally follow the lead of a loosely connected group of Marxist scholars and, primarily, Henri Lefebvre. In Lefebvre's text, The Production of Space, he argues that rather than representing a vacuous container of thoughts and ideas, space "is at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures…so there is no sense in which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition of institutions and the state which presides over them. Is space a social relationship? Certainly - but one which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production" (85). Neely and Samura seem to echo this enunciation of space, as their focus implicates the historicity and ever-changing power dynamics of space. "Place," as I use it in this essay, refers to a specific, physical locale. If "space" is a set of relations of objects, then "place" might be one of those objects. I wish to avoid the designation that place is "space with meaning" (as elucidated by Lawrence Buell). While place is certainly a space with meaning, this designation more than implies an emptiness to space that I wish to avoid. Place is a locale within space, created in part by the very dynamics of that space - a space fully implicated in varying historical, political, and social processes.

[3] A "palimpsest," in its most literal definition, refers to marks on a page that have been erased, but whose original meaning can still be determined despite this erasure. Spatially, this term refers to the continual, historical layering and obfuscation of objects in space where one can (literally and figuratively) see the remnants of previous objects. As objects in space (buildings, roads, homes, ports, etc) are destroyed and rebuilt, the visible and historical remnants of each previous object becomes archived in the collective memory and consciousness of those who encounter it.

[4] This is a different concept than the "outside" referenced earlier by McKittrick. Delaney is referring explicitly to racial geographies - a more place-centric concept. McKittrick's assertion that black people are relegated to spaces outside of modernity refers to an abstraction of social and political space, a "state of being" that is not tied to one, specific place

[5] This sentiment is very clearly articulated in Twain's The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, where a household of slaves live in constant fear of being sold "down the river."

[6] My denotation of "national" here and elsewhere in the essay refers specifically to the ways in which Sethe's experience is both reactive to and engaged within larger, institutionalized mechanisms that covered large swaths of nineteenth-century America. McKittrick notes that this more collective sense of identity can be understood "as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter. Racism and resistance to racism are therefore not the sole defining features of a black sense of place, but rather indicate how the relational violences of modernity produce a condition of being black in the Americas that is predicated on struggle" (949). Sethe's "struggle," then, is not confined to a few isolated events whose sole benefactor is herself; but rather, she is engaged in the larger narrative of struggle against an imperial modernity bent on erasure.

[7] Sethe's scarred back also acts as a rather interesting alternative map, though the significance of which is beyond the scope of this essay.

[8] The following articles all bring attention to the communal nature of 124 Bluestone, albeit from different perspectives and theoretical fields: Dara Byrne's "'Yonder they do not love your flesh': Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved: The Limitations of Citizenship and Property in the American Public Sphere," Nancy Jesser's "Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved," Andrew Hock Soon Ng's "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Space, Architecture, and Trauma," and J. Miller's "Boundaries in Beloved." Doreen Fowler's Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Conner, and Morrison also explores the relationship between community and individual identity, though not explicitly through the context of the home as space.

Works Cited

Byrne, Dara. "'Yonder they do not love your flesh': Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved: The Limitations of Citizenship and Property in the American Public Sphere." Canadian Review of American Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 25-59. 1999.

Delaney, David. "The Space that Race Makes." The Professional Geographer. Vol. 54, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jean Khalfa. Routledge: London. Spring, 1986.

Fowler, Doreen. Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison. University of Virginia Press: Charlottesville. 2013.

Harley, J.B. "Deconstructing the Map." Cartographica. Vol 26, No. 2, pp. 1-20. Spring: 1989.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. 1989.

Jesser, Nancy. "Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved." African American Review. Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 325-345. 2009.

Keith, Michael and Steve Pile. Place and the Politics of Identity. Routledge: London. 1993.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell: Oxford. 1991.

McKittrick, Katherine. "'Black and 'Cause I'm Black I'm Blue: transverse racial geographies in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Gender, Place and Culture. Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 125-142. 2000.

---. "On Plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place." Social and Cultural Geography. Vol. 12, No. 8, 2011.

Miller, J. Hillis. "Boundaries in Beloved." Symploke. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. Vol. 15, No. 1-2, pp. 24-39. 2007.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Penguin Group: New York. 1988

Neely, Brooke & Michelle Samura. "Social Geographies of Race: Connecting Race and Space." Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol. 32, No. 11, pp. 1933-1952. 2011.

Ng, Andrew. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Space, Architecture, Trauma." Symploke. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. Vol. 19, No. 1-2, pp. 231-245. 2011

Price, Patricia. "At the Crossroads: Critical Race Theory and Critical Geographies of Race." Progressive Human Geography. Vol. 34, No. 147. 2010.

Tally, Robert. Spatiality. Routledge: New York. 2013.

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