This critical analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014) utilizes a postcolonial carnivalesque critical lens, informed by Lokangaka Losambe’s innovative reinterpretation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival for application to postcolonial texts. I pay particular attention to moments in these two texts in which inversions of “order” occur and analyze how these moments build towards the culmination of resistance by societally-marginalized figures. In tracing Morrison and Abani’s reliance upon carnival disruption in texts revolving around institutional inequality, I hope to illustrate how the literary device of the carnival aligns with postcoloniality, and how this alignment inherently links two texts published twenty-seven years apart in an important conversation
