Ecriture Feminine Reconfiguration of Black Woman’s Identity in Morrison’s Beloved: A Poststructural Feminist Critique

Deriving the theoretical approach from French feminist theory, this article aims to explore within the domain of Afro-American women writing the nature of the relationship between female subjectivity, body and the language through discursive modes of expression, appropriated by Afro-American women writers to (re)inscribe the multilayered black hybrid subjectivities of the Afro-American female subject. The analysis of the theoretical connection between Poststructuralist Feminist theory and its praxis in Afro-American women’s writing exposes the dynamics of gendered narratives about woman constructed by white male writers within phallogocentric patriarchal discourses. The present research employs ecriture feminine to analyze the discursive reconstruction of the subjectivities of Afro-American women in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The analysis employs stylistic techniques anchored in the poststructural ecriture feminist theoretical framework proposed by Helene Cixous, the key French Feminist theorist of the poststructuralist feminist school of thought