The Society as the Impossible and the Return of the Political In Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997)

Given the socioeconomic conditions of the African Americans in the mainstream American culture, the African American authors have almost always had to grapple with the issue of identity and subjectivity. Toni Morrison, as an African American woman novelist, has gone beyond the issue of identity within the paradigm of hegemony and counter-hegemony to throw into relief the multivariate character of identity formation in African American community. In an attempt to investigate the identity formation in Toni Morrison’s Paradise(1997), the present article has selected the analy-tical framework of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse theory and Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). After analyzing the linguistic and discursive practices of the novel through analytical concepts of Laclau and Mouffe, it is concluded that subjectivity in Paradise is a construct contingent on the overdetermination of a myriad of discourses and relations of power which operate within the African American community. Therefore, subjectivity is a political formation.