Date of Completion
2020
Document Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
English
Thesis Type
Honors College, College of Arts and Science Honors
First Advisor
Sarah E. Turner Ph.D.
Second Advisor
Lokangaka Losambe Ph.D.
Third Advisor
Jeanne L. Shea Ph.D.
Keywords
Toni Morrison, Chris Abani, Postcolonial Theory, Carnival
Abstract
This critical analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014) utilizes a postcolonial carnivalesque critical lens, informed by Lokangaka Losambe’s innovative reinterpretation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival for application to postcolonial texts. I pay particular attention to moments in these two texts in which inversions of “order” occur and analyze how these moments build towards the culmination of resistance by societally-marginalized figures. In tracing Morrison and Abani’s reliance upon carnival disruption in texts revolving around institutional inequality, I hope to illustrate how the literary device of the carnival aligns with postcoloniality, and how this alignment inherently links two texts published twenty-seven years apart in an important conversation.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Bamberger, Katherine B., "Postcolonial Entanglement: How the Carnivalesque Links Toni Morrison and Chris Abani in Disruptive Dialogue" (2020). UVM Honors College Senior Theses. 332.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/hcoltheses/332