A Comparative Study of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan

This research presents a comparative study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan, examining the intersections of power, gender, subalternity, trauma, memory, and resistance. Despite their distinct historical, cultural, and narrative contexts, both texts foreground societies structured by violence, hierarchy, domination, and the unequal distribution of agency. By bringing together a canonical African American novel and a contemporary Japanese anime, the research demonstrates how distinct narrative forms can engage with complex questions of historical violence, marginalized experience, and the generational trauma resulting from systemic oppression. Drawing on theories of power, feminism, the subaltern, hegemony and resistance, and critical approaches to trauma and memory, the study investigates how structures of domination are produced, internalized, remembered, and contested. The paper argues that Beloved and Attack on Titan represent trauma not as an isolated psychological condition but as a continuing historical and embodied experience shaped by power, gender, memory, and marginalization. The study ultimately demonstrates how both works challenge dominant histories by foregrounding marginalized subjects and their struggles for memory, agency, survival, and resistance.