The Postmodern Metanarratives and Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

This paper tends to explore the counter discourse of a prominent Africa-American novelist; Toni Morrison. Time is materialized in space, and as a consequence, distinctive chronotopes appear pleading for an authoritative image and identity. The chronotopic discourse in Morrison's A Mercy belongs to a period which is accounted as a cornerstone in the history of the American nation. A Mercy goes back to the start of the epoch of slavery in the seventeenth century America. Though the space in Morrison's A Mercy is plantations, it seems to accentuate the theme of slavery through depicting various forms of it.
The paper investigates a very distinguished novel, A Mercy, which is accounted as revolutionary in the vein of the writings of Toni Morrison. The human basis of the writings of Morrison creates an inter/trans counter discourse. It revives the history of her nation in search for eliminating corruption through introducing a metanarrative for local and small narratives so as to legitimize the various versions of "the truth" in two crucial transitional periods in the African-American history according to which the features of the modern history of the nations are formed. The novel defies the prevalent metanarratives on slavery and corruption in a postcolonial realm. It also legitimizes a modern pluralistic view of the history of its nations by disseminating a new type of knowledge invoking metanarratives of freedom whose hero is humanity. In the postcolonial counter discourse of Morrison, Bakhtin's approach of chronotope and Lyotard's concept of metanarratives are intertwined.