Oral Storytelling as an Act of Resistance in Morrison’s Tar Baby

This paper argues that the African tradition of oral storytelling is an act of resistance conferring agency to oppressed African-Americans and countering existing Eurocentric discourses. Specifically, the paper relates storytelling, a process of telling local and personal narratives from an African vantage point, to the theoretical underpinnings of Afrocentricity expostulated by African-American theorist, Molefe Kete Asante. Storytelling serves the aims of Afrocentricity as they both work towards endowing the African subject with agency to free voices from the margin so as to subvert white supremacists’ discourse. The study brings into focus how the storytelling experience proceeds towards the liberation and tranz0sformation of the storyteller and the listener in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981). It additionally exhibits how agency is born during this process enabling the disempowered subjects to become speaking powers in recounting their stories and in deciding their own fate in a diverse society.