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In the final chapter of Beloved, the narrator repeats, "It was not a story to vass on." Nonetheless, like the ghost in the novel that haunts 124 Bluestone Road, that draws the life out of Sethe, the story is beloved. The "dearly beloved," those buried, burned, thrown overboard, who cannot or should not be forgotten, create this story that must be known and told. In the telling, Morrison not only "rememories" the experience of slavery, but she also ties her work to the production of critical theory as she deconstructs the Enlightenment notion of subjectivity to make room for what bell hooks calls a "radical black subjectivity." Morrison's narrative work poses a strong theoretical challenge to the Modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, language, history, and identity. Then, in the open space remaining, she reconstructs knowledges, histories, and identities, all of which allow for the inclusion of the African American subject and the African American experience.
However, this is no easy task. The Western intellectual tradition works against the establishment of alternatively legitimate modes of knowledge. It is not only a white intellectual tradition that has required the black experience of slavery to be viewed through a white lens. African American intellectuals have similarly tried to gain social advancement through mastery of white language and knowledge. Influenced by his Enlightenment world view, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the "Talented Tenth" that "knowledge of life and its wider meaning has been the point of the Negro's deepest ignorance" (Writings 852), thus "underestimating the capacity of everyday people to 'know' about life," argues Cornel West (58),1 and embracing instead the Modernist tradition of power/knowledge. Enlightenment thought constructed a white, heterosexual, patriarchal hegemony that marginalized those outside the "fixed" center. Similarly, Du Bois's social philosophy for the betterment of his race depended implicitly upon the Modernist view of subjectivity and language, which necessitated the presence of a rational, coherent subject. It was upon the shoulders of this "enlightened," "exceptional" man that Du Bois placed the burden to save the race, for he was far more likely to act on behalf of the common good than were the uneducated masses.
However, within the bounds of Enlightenment thought, neither Du Bois nor any other member of a socially marginalized...