"Invisible Incarceration: African American Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon"

Recasting the role of the overshadowed African American in American literature, Toni Morrison???s Song of Solomon positions her Black characters as visible, agential protagonists inhabiting the urban North, untethering their ties to a master-slave narrative indicative of the South. Yet, every White encounter in the text, often seen through the perspective of Black characters and voiced by Black characters, renders the African American subservient and disposable. Such is the literary manifestation of Michel Foucault???s circular elimination, which posits the perpetual incarceration of Black bodies as a result of an inescapable plantation ethic???an ethic which inexorably reduces the African American to subhuman. Does the African American remain subservient and demonized even in a text where Whiteness is purposefully pushed to the margins and Blackness given center stage? I argue that Black agency is not fully supplanted in Song of Solomon. Rather, it is regained through the African American???s control over language and metaphor, a power exhibited by Morrison???s characters and Morrison, herself, as narrator. Morrison recaptures the medium of language???a medium once used by her White authorial predecessors to subliminally demonize the African American???to reconfigure Black identity in the literary imagination. I will apply Morrison???s model of rereading as unearthing subliminal racism, taken from her treatise Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, to reveal an inescapable incarceration of Black identity even in a Black-authored text. Concurrently, I will highlight the ways in which Morrison unbinds herself and her black characters through linguistic and metaphorical resistance