Using the texts Beloved and Behind the Scenes, this thesis examines the cultural dynamics of purity and separation relative to what ‘blackness’ means to slavery in our nation’s discursive imagination. Toni Morrison, writing about the quotidian of black lives after slavery in Beloved, and Keckley, writing about how ‘good’ of a slave she was in her autobiographical text Behind the Scenes, both concern themselves with providing a ‘type’ of blackness before their audience that provokes and disturbs according to preconceived expectations of blackness relative to the slave institution. This concern with a ‘type’ of blackness works inextricably with the greater lens of identity in America that refer immensely to the ‘purity’ and one dimensionality of a person’s identity, despite their claims to multiple memberships of race, gender, sex, and class. Both Beloved and Behind the Scenes offer historical and fictional examples of the dynamism of black characters, and how ‘blackness’ both creates and participates in wider discussions of identity in America across race, gender, and class—on things not ‘necessarily’ black. By showing this dynamism of blackness, both of these text challenge the assumed ‘types’ of ‘blackness’ accepted by the wider American imagination, as well as challenging the rigidity of current identity optics that work to obscure the importance of ‘blackness’ to our nation’s socioeconomic history: to mask the importance of blackness to things not necessarily ‘black.’
