NEGOTIATING MANICHEAN ALLEGORY IN MORRISON’S PARADISE

Abstract

The colonialist mind is full of binary thinking. Their literature is abounding in nothing other than racial thinking in their deep structure. There are varieties of binary thinking that set a single outlook towards the colonial power: an ideology of self and other. The following descriptive study is a kind of confirmation of this ideology. Abdullah JanMuhammad has discussed in detail the colonialist literature and the impact of European values on indigenous mind through the pieces of literature. He asserts that the colonialist literature depicts a stereotypical mindset of colonizers towards colonized, which is a product of social and cultural difference. Toni Morrison being a spokesperson of different racial issue is portraying the same stereotypical attitude on moral and intellectual grounds. She is making her novel Paradise, a device to articulate that there is no phase in-between their self and the colonized’s other and there cannot be any reconciliation and settlement between the colonizer and the colonized.