Online Talk · “A Conflagration of Hasty Voices:” Underworld Symbolism in Beloved with Cultural Mythologist Jasmyne D. Gilbert
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, June 16, 2025
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Join scholar Jasmyne Gilbert for an exploration of myth and liminal spaces in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Focusing on the Ohio River, 124 Bluestone Road, and its surrounding forest, we will examine how the novel’s landscape holds the characters’ grief, connects them to death and the underworld, and helps them transmute trauma.
Beloved (1973) is a text rich with the presence of the ghosts of kin and loved ones from other worlds. The novel is author Toni Morrison’s fictionalization of the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who fled to Ohio from a Kentucky plantation with her four children in 1856. Beloved earned Morrison the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was adapted as an award-winning motion picture in 1998. The story includes numerous mythic symbols from Greco-Roman mythology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and archetypal psychology. Popular analyses of the book and its later feature film adaptation examine the psychological and social repercussions of a mother’s act of infanticide and what occurs 18 years later when her child’s ghost returns.
Be advised: this lecture will include discussions of death, human trafficking, sexual assault, infanticide, and other difficult subjects.
Jasmyne Gilbert (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural mythologist amplifying the stories that shape, sustain, and subvert American cultures. For Jasmyne, stories are sources of power and tools for critique and transformation. Merging myth, depth psychology, speculative imagination (what-if thinking), and cultural analysis, her research examines the hidden potential of narratives to inspire community-building and systemic change. She holds degrees in English and Mythological Studies from Tuskegee University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. You can follow her public research at jasmynegilbert.com
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, June 16, 2025
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Join scholar Jasmyne Gilbert for an exploration of myth and liminal spaces in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Focusing on the Ohio River, 124 Bluestone Road, and its surrounding forest, we will examine how the novel’s landscape holds the characters’ grief, connects them to death and the underworld, and helps them transmute trauma.
Beloved (1973) is a text rich with the presence of the ghosts of kin and loved ones from other worlds. The novel is author Toni Morrison’s fictionalization of the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who fled to Ohio from a Kentucky plantation with her four children in 1856. Beloved earned Morrison the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was adapted as an award-winning motion picture in 1998. The story includes numerous mythic symbols from Greco-Roman mythology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and archetypal psychology. Popular analyses of the book and its later feature film adaptation examine the psychological and social repercussions of a mother’s act of infanticide and what occurs 18 years later when her child’s ghost returns.
Be advised: this lecture will include discussions of death, human trafficking, sexual assault, infanticide, and other difficult subjects.
Jasmyne Gilbert (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural mythologist amplifying the stories that shape, sustain, and subvert American cultures. For Jasmyne, stories are sources of power and tools for critique and transformation. Merging myth, depth psychology, speculative imagination (what-if thinking), and cultural analysis, her research examines the hidden potential of narratives to inspire community-building and systemic change. She holds degrees in English and Mythological Studies from Tuskegee University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. You can follow her public research at jasmynegilbert.com
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, June 16, 2025
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Join scholar Jasmyne Gilbert for an exploration of myth and liminal spaces in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Focusing on the Ohio River, 124 Bluestone Road, and its surrounding forest, we will examine how the novel’s landscape holds the characters’ grief, connects them to death and the underworld, and helps them transmute trauma.
Beloved (1973) is a text rich with the presence of the ghosts of kin and loved ones from other worlds. The novel is author Toni Morrison’s fictionalization of the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who fled to Ohio from a Kentucky plantation with her four children in 1856. Beloved earned Morrison the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was adapted as an award-winning motion picture in 1998. The story includes numerous mythic symbols from Greco-Roman mythology, Judeo-Christian tradition, and archetypal psychology. Popular analyses of the book and its later feature film adaptation examine the psychological and social repercussions of a mother’s act of infanticide and what occurs 18 years later when her child’s ghost returns.
Be advised: this lecture will include discussions of death, human trafficking, sexual assault, infanticide, and other difficult subjects.
Jasmyne Gilbert (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural mythologist amplifying the stories that shape, sustain, and subvert American cultures. For Jasmyne, stories are sources of power and tools for critique and transformation. Merging myth, depth psychology, speculative imagination (what-if thinking), and cultural analysis, her research examines the hidden potential of narratives to inspire community-building and systemic change. She holds degrees in English and Mythological Studies from Tuskegee University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. You can follow her public research at jasmynegilbert.com