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History and literature have been known to ascribe a blanket of sameness in the study of black communities and their issues. The chapter approaches the concept of dissimilarity within communities of colored folk, specifically among its women, which focus on differences pertaining to social status, color, race, and gender. The chapter presents the reader with three novels of Afro-American female authors and their exploration of colored female “otherness” in their works. The novels of Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, are tackled first, with her treatment and reinvention of the mulatto with influences from 19th-century literature from both black and white authors. Toni Morrison's Sula also examines the concept of difference, but without the mulatto figure highlighted in the previous books discussed. The three literary works reveal that differences in these Afro-American sub-societies are rooted deeply in sexuality and community building.

This chapter argues that in the novels that address the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s — Jazz, The Bluest Eye, and Sula — Morrison examines the opportunities and pitfalls that ‘freedom’ proscribed by segregation entailed. Together with Home, which is set primarily in the 1950s but which incorporates retrospective depictions of earlier decades, these novels enlist classical notions of ‘fate’, ‘sacrifice’, and classical purification rituals in their representations of city and town life, and of the continuing quest for a viable black identity. It argues that Jazz writes against dominant American versions of pastoral (epitomized by Leo Marx) in its depiction of black urbanization, and that Home enacts a complex dialogue with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The chapter ends by discussing the political implications of the final rejection of Aristotelian ‘catastrophe’ or ‘calamity’ in Morrison's trilogy and other texts.

This chapter examines Morrison's challenge to the fabricated conception of classicism as a ‘pure’ boy of culture, as a European pedigree on which so many aspects of dominant American identity depend. It demonstrates the novelist's interest in the historical connectedness of Africa (both North and West) with Ancient Greece and Rome. It explores her affinities with Martin Bernal, Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, and Wole Soyinka; her anthologizing of African literature in the 1970s; her use of Egyptian traditions and of the Gnostic gospels in the Nag Hammadi library; her revisionary deployment of Ovid's Metamorphoses to restore Africa to both the classical tradition and to the American structures that depend on that tradition; and her adaptations of Aesop's fables. The key novels discussed her are Sula, Paradise, and Jazz.

In this essay Davíd Carrasco wants to reflect on two religious dimensions in Morrison’s language of catching, of doing and of togetherness. He presents a hybrid essay mixing fragments from journals with interpretations of magical flight in her novel Song of Solomon and sacred place in her novel Sula. Morrison and García Márquez first met in 1996 at the home of Carlos Fuentes and returned to Mexico again in 2005 for a second Mexico meeting with the Colombian novelist. Morrison has discussed the various ways the sacred appears in her writings—1) traditional Christian ritual and symbols, 2) African influenced themes and characters, and 3) what Morrison calls “Strange Stuff. The themes of magical flight and sacred place link literary strategies both writers use in their novels (One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon and Sula). (138 words)

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s and Caryl Phillips’s portraits of African American troops in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. These authors’ stories of African American soldiers and veterans bring together two topic areas that may, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other: war and diaspora. This chapter interrogates the complex relationship between diasporic subjectivity and national citizenship. Utilizing Caruthian trauma theory, it reveals how Morrison, in Sulaand Tar Baby, and Phillips, in Crossing the River, subtly link their narratives of temporary traumatic displacement on foreign battlefields with the historical ur-trauma of diasporic dislocation. In these novels, the wounds that the Middle Passage and slavery inflicted on black diasporic bodies and psyches metaphorically bleed into, and coalesce with, traumas and post-traumatic conditions resulting from black participation in modern warfare—participation that both Morrison and Phillips depict in terms of young black men being sent abroad to fight destructive and traumatizing wars that are not theirs to fight. The literal and metaphorical connections that Morrison and Phillips forge between war and diaspora in various ways call attention to the greed and large-scale violence that have all too often accompanied the Western project of modernity.

This chapter examines the depiction of law and sacrifice in the novels of Toni Morrison. It analyzes how Morrison portrayed the violations of black communities, such as lynching, in some of her works including Sula, Paradise, and Jazz and discusses her insistence that the concept-metaphor of firing be opened wide to include being fired upon and being burned. This chapter also discusses the views of Morrison on the figure of law and on the transformation of the liberating violence of equivalence into the gross commodification of humans.

This chapter examines the shortcomings of the main character in Toni Morrison's second novel Sula, particularly her negligence of African values. It analyzes archetypes and symbols that mark Sula's definitions as well as her rejection of the living ancestor's presence and her departure from an understanding of African worldview. It suggests that this novel leaves readers with a formidable picture of cultural and physical death by reiterating the true powers available to African people if they listen to ancestral voices, practice their cultural traditions and accept responsibility for one another.