Speaker: Prof. Jeffrey Gibbons (United States Military Academy at West Point)
Title: “Nothing Ever Dies: Trauma, Memory, and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”

Event date and time: Friday 15 November 2024,  13.00  – 15.00

Location: Faculty Room, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent

This “Meet the PhD Jury” activity will consist of two parts. Professor Gibbons will begin with a lecture on trauma and healing in the work of African American author Toni Morrison, particularly in her novel Beloved. He will then facilitate a session in which participants will work together on a textual analysis based on excerpts from the novel. The activity is aimed at PhD candidates, but may also inspire more senior staff.

Abstract: Early in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, former slave Sethe discusses the haunting consequences of slavery with her daughter Denver and urges Denver to try to understand its extensive and seemingly unending impact on African Americans.  Sethe stresses to Denver that even though a trauma might pass with time, and even if a physical building or location where a trauma occurred might cease to exist, “the place—the picture of it—stays […] out there, in the world.” Denver struggles to understand her mother’s declaration and asks, “if it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.” And Sethe agrees: “nothing ever does.”

The conversation is a telling one: the physical and psychological traumas that slavery has wrought on Sethe haunt her, and this suffering influences her perspectives on motherhood and the ways that she raises her children.

Throughout her lifetime, Toni Morrison consistently sought, through her writing, to reflect the myriad diverse traumas of the African American experience on a much broader scale. From her first novel in 1970, The Bluest Eye, to her final work, Home, in 2015, Morrison continually emphasized the enduring physical and psychological traumas that subjugation, inequality, and racial violence inflicted on African Americans—and her efforts ultimately resulted in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

For my presentation, I will examine several aspects of Morrison’s transformative novel Beloved which I believe most provocatively and effectively convey the profound, enduring impact of slavery on both individual African Americans and the greater African American community. I will embrace theoretical lenses offered by American trauma studies, in addition to the perspectives Morrison offers in her own scholarly work, Playing in the Dark. Through an examination of several crucial excerpts from Beloved, I hope to convey the evocative ways that Morrison’s novel simultaneously overwhelms us with the traumatic experiences of chattel slavery and suggests a path toward healing as well.

Bio: My primary scholarly interest is Asian American literature. I’m particularly interested in the ways that contemporary Asian American writers reflect upon and depict war, trauma, and modes of healing in post-war lives. As a professor I relish the opportunity at West Point to challenge our cadets to think critically and carefully about the nation and world in which they’re about to serve—and to challenge them to develop empathy for those who are different from them. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, so I’ve been a displaced Buckeye for over twenty years now; at the same time, my PhD work in Chapel Hill transformed me into a Tar Heel. My wife and I enjoy the outdoors, music, good food, and travel. One of my lifelong intellectual escapes consists of immersing myself in the works of Robert Hunter, John Perry Barlow, and Robert Peterson.

Contact: Inge.Brinkman@UGent.Be