Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate

Author(s): Homi K. Bhabha

Source: October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question (Summer, 1992), pp. 46-57
Published by: The MIT Press
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 Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate*

HOMI K. BHABHA

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of

cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority
within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the
colonial or anticolonialist testimonies of Third World countries and from the
testimony of minorities within the geopolitical division of East/West, North/
South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity
that have attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development
and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, commu-
nities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated around issues of
cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to
reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of
modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we could also argue that
the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore
those social pathologies-"loss of meaning, conditions of anomie"-that no
longer simply "cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely
scattered historical contingencies."'
These contingencies often provide the grounds of historical necessity for
the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social
antagonisms. Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more
than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within
the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution
requires a radical revision of the social temporalityin which emergent histories
may be written: the rearticulation of the "sign" in which cultural identities may
be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strat-
egies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of
negative ontologies. Such "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet

* Short sections of this talk have been published elsewhere.

1. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978),
p. 348.
Freedom'sBasis in the Indeterminate 47

productive space in which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification

emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse.
It is in this salutary sense that various contemporary critical theories sug-
gest that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking from those
who have suffered the sentence of history-subjugation, domination, diaspora,
displacement. There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience
of social marginality-as it emerges in noncanonical cultural forms-trans-
forms our critical strategies. It forces us to confront the concept of culture
outside objetsd'art or beyond the canonization of the "Idea" of aesthetics, and
thus to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning
and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, and
produced in the act of social survival. Culture reaches out to create a symbolic
textuality, to give the alienating everyday an "aura" of selfhood, a promise of
pleasure. The transmission of "cultures of survival" does not occur in the
ordered musee ordinaireof national cultures-with their claims to the continuity
of an authentic past and a living present-regardless of whether this scale of
value is preserved in the organicist national traditions of romanticism or within
the more universal proportions of classicism.
Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnationaland translational. It is
transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in spe-
cific histories of cultural displacement: in the "middle passage" of slavery and
indenture; in the "voyage out" of the colonialist civilizing mission; in the fraught
accommodation of postwar "third world" migration to the West; or in the traffic
of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. It is
translational because such spatial histories of displacement-now accompanied
by the territorial ambitions of global media technologies-make the question
of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, rather complex issues. It
becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the
symbolsacross diverse cultural experiences-literature, art, music, ritual, life,
death-and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as it
circulates as a sign within specific contextual locations and social systems of
value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation-migration,
diaspora, displacement, relocations-turns the specifying or localizing process
of cultural translation into a complex process of signification. For the natu-
ral(ized), unifying discourse of "nation," "peoples," "folk" tradition-these
embedded myths of culture's particularity-cannot be readily referenced. The
great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes one increas-
ingly aware of the construction of culture, the invention of tradition, the ret-
roactive nature of social affiliation and psychic identification.
The postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology
of underdevelopment or the "dependency" theory. As a mode of analysis it
attempts to revise those nationalist or "nativist" pedagogies that set up the
relation of Third and First Worlds in a binary structure of opposition. The
48 OCTOBER

postcolonial perspective resists attempts to provide a holistic social explanation,

forcing a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries
that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres.
It is from this hybrid location of cultural value-the transnational as the
translational-that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical
and literary project. It has been my growing conviction that the encounters and
negotiations of differential meanings and values within the governmental dis-
courses and cultural practices that make up "colonial" textuality have enacted,
avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgment that have
become current in contemporary theory: aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy,
the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intention-
ality, the challenge to "totalizing" concepts, to name but a few.
To put it in general terms, there is a "colonial" countermodernity at work
in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century matrices of Western modernity that,
if acknowledged, would question the historicism that, in a linear narrative,
analogically links late capitalism to the fragmentary, simulacral, pastiche-like
symptoms of postmodernity. This is done without taking into account the his-
torical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy that were
generated in the attempt to produce an "enlightened" colonial subject-in both
the foreign and native varieties-and that transformed, in the process, both
antagonistic sites of cultural agency.
Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do
not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic
domain of psychic and social identifications. The incommensurability of cultural
values and priorities that the postcolonial critic represents cannot be accom-
modated within a relativism that assumes a public and symmetrical world. And
the cultural potential of such differential histories has led Fredric Jameson to
recognize the "internationalization of the national situations" in the postcolonial
criticism of Roberto Retamar. Far from functioning as an absorption of the
particular by the general, the very act of articulating cultural differences "calls
us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither re-
duc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor ...
vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures."2
The historical grounds of such an intellectual tradition are to be found in
the revisionary impulse that informs many postcolonial thinkers. C. L. R. James
once remarked that the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and
rewriting the forms and effects of an "older" colonial consciousness from the
later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-
war histories of the Western metropolis. A similar process of cultural translation,

2. Roberto Fernandez, Calibanand OtherEssays,trans. Edward Baker, foreword Fredric Jameson

(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), pp. xi-xii.
Freedom'sBasis in the Indeterminate 49

and transvaluation, is evident in Edward Said's assessment of the response from

disparate postcolonial regions as a "tremendously energetic attempt to engage
with the metropolitan world in a common effort at reinscribing, reinterpreting,
and expanding the sites of intensity and the terrain contested with Europe."3
How does the deconstruction of the sign, the emphasis on indeterminism
in cultural and political judgment, transform our sense of the subject of culture
and the historical agent of change? If we contest the grand, continuist narratives,
then what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the contrapuntal
(Said) or interruptive (Spivak) formations of race, gender, class, and nation
within a transnational world culture?
Such problematic questions are activated within the terms and traditions
of postcolonial critique as it reinscribes the cultural relations between spheres
of social antagonism. Current debates in postmodernism question the cunning
of modernity-its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, the paradoxical
nature of progress. It would profoundly affect the values and judgments of
such interrogations if they were open to the argument that metropolitan his-
tories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the colonial antecedents of
the ideals of civility. The postcolonial translation of modernity does not simply
revalue the contents of a cultural tradition or transpose values across cultures
through the transcendent spirit of a "common humanity."

Cultural translation transforms the value of culture-as-sign: as the time-

signature of the historical "present" that is struggling to find its mode of nar-
ration. The sign of cultural difference does not celebrate the great continuities
of a past tradition, the seamless narratives of progress, the vanity of humanist
wishes. Culture-as-sign articulates that in-between moment when the rule of
language as semiotic system-linguistic difference, the arbitrariness of the
sign-turns into a struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify. The rule
of language as signifying system-the possibility of speaking at all-becomes
the misrule of discourse: the right for only some to speak diachronically and
differentially and for "others"-women, migrants, Third World peoples, Jews,
Palestinians, for instance-to speak only symptomatically or marginally. How
do we transform the formal value of linguistic difference into an analytic of
cultural difference? How do we turn the "arbitrariness" of the sign into the
critical practices of social authority? In what sense is this an interruption within
the discourses of modernity?
This is not simply a demand for a postcolonial semiology. From the

3. Edward Said, "Intellectuals and the Post-Colonial World," Salmagundi 70/71 (Spring/Summer
1986).
50 OCTOBER

postcolonial perspective, it is an intervention in the way discourses of modernity

structure their objects of knowledge. The right to signify-to make a name for
oneself-emerges from the moment of undecidability-a claim made by
Jacques Derrida in "Des Tours de Babel," his essay on "figurative translation."
Let us not forget that he sees translation as the trope for the process of dis-
placement through which language names its object. But even more suggestive,
for our postcolonial purposes, is the Babel metaphor that Derrida uses to
describe the cultural, communal process of "making a name for oneself": "The
Semites want to bring the world to reason and this reason can signify simulta-
neously a colonial violence . . . and a peaceful transparency of the human
condition."4
This is emphatically not, as Terry Eagleton has recently described it, "the
trace or aporia or ineffable flicker of difference which eludes all formalization,
that giddy moment of failure, slippage, or jouissance."5 The undecidability of
discourse is not to be read as the "excess" of the signifier, as an aestheticization
of the formal arbitrariness of the sign. Rather, it represents, as Habermas
suggests, the central ambivalence of the knowledge structure of modernity;
"unconditionality" is the Janus-faced process at work in the modern moment
of cultural judgment, where validity claims seek justification for their proposi-
tions in terms of the specificity of the "everyday." Undecidability or uncondi-
tionality "is built into the factual processes of mutual understanding.... Validity
claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times, but the claim
must always be raised here and now, in specific contexts."6
Pace Eagleton, this is no giddy moment of failure; it is instead precisely
the act of representation as a mode of regulating the limits or liminality of
cultural knowledges. Habermas illuminates the undecidable or "unconditional"
as the epistemological basis of cultural specificity, and thus, in the discourse of
modernity, the claim to knowledge shifts from the "universal" to the domain of
context-bound everyday practice. However, Habermas's notion of communica-
tive reason presumes intersubjective understanding and reciprocal recognition.
This renders his sense of cultural particularity essentially consensual and essen-
tialist. What of those colonial cultures caught in the drama of the dialectic of
the master and the enslaved or indentured?
This concept of the right to signify is, in the context of contemporary
postcolonial poetry, nowhere more profoundly evoked than in Derek Walcott's
poem on the colonization of the Caribbean through the possession of a space
by means of the power of naming. In Walcott's "Names," ordinary language
develops an auratic authority, an imperial persona; but in a specifically post-

4. Jacques Derrida, "Des Tours de Babel," in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 174.
5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideologyof the Aesthetics(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 370.
6. Habermas, The PhilosophicalDiscourseof Modernity,p. 323.
Freedom'sBasis in the Indeterminate 51

colonial performance of repetition, the focus shifts from the nominalism of

linguistic imperialism to the emergence of another history of the sign. It is
another destiny of culture as a site-one based not simply on subversion and
transgression, but on the prefiguration of a kind of solidarity between ethnicities
that meet in the tryst of colonial history. Walcott explores that space of cultural
translation between the double meanings of culture: culture as the noun for
naming the social imaginary, and culture as the act for grafting the voices of
the indentured, the displaced, the nameless, onto an agency of utterance.
My race began as the sea began,
with no nouns, and with no horizon,
with pebbles under my tongue,
with a different fix on the stars ....

Have we melted into a mirror,

leaving our souls behind?
The goldsmith from Benares,
the stonecutter from Canton,
the bronzesmith from Benin.

A sea-eagle screams from the rock,

and my race began like the osprey
with that cry,
that terrible vowel,
that I!

... this stick

to trace our names on the sand
which the sea erased again, to our indifference.

And when they named these bays

bays,
was it nostalgia or irony? ...

Where were the courts of Castile?

Versailles' colonnades
supplanted by cabbage palms
with Corinthian crests,
belittling diminutives,
then, little Versailles
meant plans for the pigsty,
names for the sour apples
and green grapes
of their exile ....
52 OCTOBER

Being men, they could not live

except they first presumed
the right of everything to be a noun.
The African acquiesced,
repeated, and changed them.

Listen, my children, say:

moubain: the hogplum,
cerise: the wild cherry,
baie-la: the bay,
with the fresh green voices
they were once themselves
in the way the wind bends
our natural inflections.

These palms are greater than Versailles,

for no man made them,
their fallen columns greater than Castile,
no man unmade them
except the worm, who has no helmet,
but was always the emperor,

and children, look at these stars

over Valencia's forest!

Not Orion,
Not Betelgeuse,
tell me, what do they look like?
Answer you damned little Arabs!
Sir, fireflies caught in molasses.7
In this poem, there are two myths of history, each related to opposing
versions of the place of language in the process of cultural knowledge. There
is the pedagogical process of imperialist naming:
Being men, they could not live
except they first presumed
the right of everything to be a noun.

7. Derek Walcott, CollectedPoems 1948-1984 (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), pp. 305-8.
Freedom'sBasis in the Indeterminate 53

Opposed to this is the African acquiescence, which, in repeating the lessons of

the masters, changes their inflections:
moubain: the hogplum
cerise: the wild cherry
baie-la: the bay
with the fresh green voices
they were once themselves ...
Walcott's purpose is not to oppose the pedagogy of the imperialist noun to the
inflectional appropriation of the native voice; he proposes instead to go beyond
such binaries of power in order to reorganize our sense of the process of
language in the negotiations of cultural politics. He stages the slaves' right to
signify not simply by denying the imperialist "right for everything to be a noun"
but by questioning the masculinist, authoritative subjectivity produced in the
colonizing process. What is "man" as an effect of, as subjected to, the sign-
the noun-of a colonizing discourse? To this end, Walcott poses the problem
of beginning outside the question of origins, beyond that perspectival field of
vision which constitutes human consciousness in the "mirror of nature" (as
Richard Rorty has famously described the project of positivism). According to
this ideology, language is always a form of visual epistemology, the miming of
a pre-given reality; knowing is implicated in the confrontational polarity of
subject and object, Self and Other.
Within this mode of representation, naming (or nouning) the world is a
mimetic act. It is founded on an idealism of the iconic sign, which assumes that
repetition in language is the symptom of an inauthentic act, of nostalgia or
mockery. In the context of imperialist naming, this can only lead to ethnocentric
disdain or cultural despair:
Where were the courts of Castile?
Versailles' colonnades
supplanted by cabbage palms
with Corinthian crests,
belittling diminutives ...
Thus Walcott's history begins elsewhere: in that temporality of the negation of
essences to which Fanon led us; in that moment of undecidability or uncondi-
tionality that constitutes the ambivalence of modernity as it executes its critical
judgments or seeks justification for its social facts. Against the possessive, coer-
cive "right" of the Western noun, Walcott places a different mode of speech, a
different historical time envisaged in the discourse of the enslaved or the
indentured-the goldsmith from Benares, the stonecutter from Canton, the
bronzesmith from Benin.
My race began as the sea began,
with no nouns, and with no horizon . ..
54 OCTOBER

I began with no memory,

I began with no future ...

I have never found that moment

When the mind was halved by a horizon ...

And my race began like the osprey

with that cry,
that terrible vowel,
that I!

Is there a historical timelessness at the heart of slavery? By erasing the

sovereign subject of the Western mind, of the mind "halved by the horizon,"
Walcott erases the mode of historicism that predicates the colonial civilizing
mission on the question of the origin of races. "My race began . . . with no
nouns." With this Walcott destroys the Eurocentric narrative of nouns, the
attempt to objectify the New World, to enclose it in the teleology of the noun,
in the fetish of naming. In destroying the teleology of the subject of naming,
Walcott refuses to totalize differences, to make of culture a holistic, organic
system. What is more, he emphatically stills that future-drive of the (imperialist)
discourse of modernization or progress that conceals the disjunctive, frag-
mented moment of the colonial "present" by overlaying it with grand narratives
and grandiose names or nouns: Castile, Versailles. Walcott reveals the space
and time in which the struggle for the proper name of the postcolonial poet
ensues.
Walcott's timeless moment, that undecidability from which he builds his
narrative, opens up his poem to the historical present that Walter Benjamin, in
his description of the historian, characterizes as a "present which is not a
transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion
defines the present in which he himself is writing history."8 Yet what is the
history that is being rewritten in this present? Where does the postcolonial
subject lie?
With "that terrible vowel, that I," Walcott opens up the disjunctive present
of the poem's writing of its history. The "I" as vowel, as the arbitrariness of the
signifier, is the sign of iteration or repetition; it is nothing in itself, only ever its
difference. The "I" as pronomial, as the avowal of the enslaved colonial subject-
position, is contested by the repetition of the "I" as vocal or vowel "sign," as the
agency of history, tracing its name on the shifting sands, constituting a post-
colonial, migrant community-in-difference: Hindu, Chinese, African. With this

8. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 262.
Freedom'sBasis in the Indeterminate 55

disjunctive, double "I," Walcott writes a history of cultural difference that en-
visages the production of difference as the political and social definition of the
historical present. Cultural differences must be understood as they constitute
identities-contingently, indeterminately-between the repetition of the vowel
i (which can always be reinscribed, relocated) and the restitution of the subject
"I." Read like this, between the I-as-symbol and the I-as-sign, the articulations
of difference-race, history, gender-are never singular, binary, or totalizable.
These cultural differentials are most productively read as existing in-between
each other. If they make claims to their radical singularity or separatism, they
do so at the peril of their historical destiny to change, transform, solidarize.
Claims to identity must never be nominative or normative. They are never
nouns when they are productive; like the vowel, they must be capable of turning
up in and as an other's difference and of turning the "right" to signify into an
act of cultural translation.

The postcolonial revision of modernity I am arguing for has a political

place in the writings of Raymond Williams. Williams makes an important dis-
tinction between emergent and residual practices of oppositionality, which re-
quire what he describes as a "non-metaphysical and non-subjectivist" historical
position. He does not elaborate on this complex idea, but I hope that my
description of agency as it emerges in the disjunctive temporality of the "pres-
ent" in the postcolonial text may be one important instance of it. This concept
has a contemporary relevance for those burgeoning forces of the left who are
attempting to formulate a "politics of difference" that avoids both essentialism
and cultural "nationalism"; Williams suggests that in certain historical
moments-ours certainly among them-the profound deformation of the dom-
inant culture will prevent it from recognizing "political practices and cultural
meanings that are not reached for."9
Such a notion of the emergence of a cultural "minority" has a vivid real-
ization in the work of many black American women writers-writers who em-
phasize, according to Houston Baker, "the processual quality of meaning . . .
not material instantiation at any given moment but the efficacy of passage."10
Such a passage of time-as-meaning emerges with a sudden ferocity in the work
of the African-American poet Sonia Sanchez:
life is obscene with crowds
of black on white

9. Raymond Williams, Problemsin Materialismand Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 43.

10. Houston Baker, "Our Lady: Sonia Sanchez and the Writing of a Black Renaissance," in
Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Meridian, 1990).
56 OCTOBER

death is my pulse.
what might have been
is not for him/or me
but what could have been
floods the womb until i drown."

You can hear it in the ambiguity between "what might have been" and
"what could have been"-again, in that undecidability through which Sanchez
attempts to write her history of the present. You read it in that considerable
shift in historical time between an obscene racist past-the "might have been"
-and the emergence of a new birth that is visible in the writing itself-the
"could have been." You see it suggested in the almost imperceptible displace-
ment in tense and syntax-might, could-that makes all the difference between
the pulse of death and the flooded womb of birth. And it is this repetition-
the repetition of the could-in-the-might-that expresses the right to signify.
The postcolonial passage through modernity produces a form of retro-
action: the past as projective. It is not a cyclical form of repetition that circulates
around a lack. The time lag of postcolonial modernity moves forward, erasing
that compliant past tethered to the myth of progress, ordered in the binarisms
of its cultural logic: past/present, inside/outside. This forward is neither teleo-
logical nor is it an endless slippage. It is the function of the lag to slow down
the linear, progressive time of modernity to reveal its gesture, its tempi-"the
pauses and stresses of the whole performance." This can only be achieved-as
Walter Benjamin remarked of Brecht's epic theater-by damming the stream
of life, by bringing the flow to a standstill in a reflux of astonishment.
When the dialectic of modernity is brought to a standstill, then the tem-
poral action of modernity-its progressive future drive-is staged, revealing
"everything that is involved in the act of staging per se."'2 This slowing down,
or lagging, impels the past, projects it, gives its "dead" symbols the circulatory
life of the "sign" of the present, of passage, of the quickening of the quotidian.
Where these temporalities touch contingently, their spatial boundaries overlap;
at that moment their margins are sutured in the articulation of the "disjunctive"
present. And this time-lag keeps alive the making and remaking of the past. As
it negotiates the levels and liminalities of that spatial time that I have tried to
unearth in the postcolonial archaeology of modernity, you might think that it
"lacks" time or history. But don't be fooled!

11. Sonia Sanchez, quoted in Baker, "Our Lady: Sonia Sanchez," pp. 329-30.
12. Walter Benjamin, UnderstandingBrecht, trans. Stanley Mitchell (London: New Left Books,
1973), pp. 11-13. I have freely adapted some of Benjamin's phrases and interpolated the problem
of modernity into the midst of his argument on Epic theater. I do not think that I have misrepre-
sented his argument.
Freedom'sBasis in the Indeterminate 57

It appears "timeless" only in that sense in which, for Toni Morrison,

African-American art is "astonished" by the belated figure of the ancestor
... "the timelessness is there, this person who represented this ancestor."13And
when the ancestor rises from the dead in the guise of the murdered slave
daughter, Beloved, then we see the furious emergence of the projective past.
Beloved is not the ancestor, the elder, whom Morrison describes as benevolent,
instructive, and protective. Her presence, as revenant, is profoundly time-lagged
and moves forward while continually encircling the moment of the "not there"
that Morrison sees as the stressed, dislocatory absence that is crucial for the
reconstruction of the narrative of slavery. Ella, a member of the chorus, standing
at that very distance from the "event" from which modernity produces its
historical sign, now describes the projective past:
The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it
didn't stay behind you might have to stomp it out.... As long as the
ghost showed out from its ghostly place . . . Ella respected it. But if
it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other
foot. She didn't mind a little communication between the two worlds,
but his was an invasion.'4

The emergence of the "projective past" introduces into the narratives of

identity and community a necessary split between the time of utterance and the
space of memory. This "lagged" temporality is not some endless slippage; it is
a mode of breaking the complicity of past and present in order to open up a
space of revision and initiation. It is, in other words, the articulation between
the pronomial "I" and verbal/vocal i that Walcott stages in the process of creating
a postcolonial, Caribbean voice that is heard in the interstitial experience of
diaspora and migration, somewhere between the "national" origins of the Benin
bronzesmith, the Cantonese stonecutter, and the goldsmith from Benares.
The histories of slavery and colonialism that create the discursive condi-
tions for the projective past and its split narratives are tragic and painful in the
extreme, but it is their agony that makes them exemplary texts for our moment.
They represent an idea of action and agency more complex than either the
nihilism of despair or the utopia of progress. They speak of the reality of
survival and negotiation that constitutes the lived moment of resistance, its
sorrow and its salvation-the moment that is rarely spoken in the stories of
heroism that are enshrined in the histories we choose to remember and recount.

13. Toni Morrison, "The Ancestor as Foundation," in Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans
(London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 343.
14. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), pp. 256-57.