Intergenerational Trauma in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child
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Date
2020-06
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Abstract
The current study examines intergenerational trauma in Toni Morrison’s God Help
the Child (2015) and its effects on different African American generations.
Therefore, the main focus of this study is to investigate the Legacy of slavery on
modern day African Americans and how its trauma is still transmitted from one
generation to another. Morrison depicts the characters’ lives in a way that highlights
the racist ideologies that are still enduring in post-racial America. This depiction is
analyzed in this study to explore the traumatic effects of slavery such as Post Slave
Syndrome, interracial racism, and racialized beauty standards. To achieve this, the
work attests to analyze the childhood traumatic experiences of the characters and
their effects in their adulthood decisions. The study adopts trauma theory as the
main theoretical approach to explore how trauma as a process of transmission
transforms racial subjects from one generation to another and how the aftermath of
slavery is still a contemporary interest. The study concludes with the fact that time is
always repeating itself but never changes, racial ideologies still have destructive
roles in the blacks’ lives.
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Keywords: Intergenerational trauma, interracial racism, Trauma transmission, Morrison, African Americans.