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Abstract
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This study examines Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), and God Help the Child (2015), in the light of postcolonial conception of agency which means the ways in which the colonized people actively confront and resist the colonizers. This thesis draws upon Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s views on the concept of agency as proposed in The Location of the Culture (2004) and “Can the Subaltern Speak” (1988). In The Location of Culture, Bhabha argues that agency occurs with negotiation. It means that the agency defined by Bhabha is not violent struggle against the colonizer. This study focuses on the agential aspect of the colonized people against the colonizers in the above-mentioned novels. The researcher argues that critics of these novels ceased to consider the active agency of the colonized people. In the researcher’s view, the colonized characters of the novels including Florens in A Mercy, Frank and Ycidra in Home, and Bride in God Help the Child employ different ways to resist the colonizers. By analyzing these novels through Bhabhaian and Spivakian concepts of hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, uncanny, and subaltern, the researcher tries to indicate these characters’ agency through nonviolent means that does not endanger the colonized individual’s life.
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