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Reading as Listening: The Southern Folk Aesthetic

Madhu Dubey

in Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism

This chapter examines the ways in which the rural South works as a stimulant for the postmodern African–American literary imagination and the kinds of resolutions it yields to problems of urban ... More

This chapter examines the ways in which the rural South works as a stimulant for the postmodern African–American literary imagination and the kinds of resolutions it yields to problems of urban literary representation. It focuses on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, because these two novels admit, often self-reflexively but sometimes inadvertently, the difficulties plaguing their own use of the rural South as a device of literary resolution to postmodern urban problems. These difficulties become manifest in Morrison's and Naylor's contradictory treatments of two interconnected systems of cultural value—magic and oral tradition—that are embedded in the rural South and presented as the distinguishing marks of an integral black community.Less

The Lynched Earth: Trees, Trespass, and Political Intelligence in Welty’s “A Worn Path” and Morrison’s Home

Donnie McMahand and Kevin L. Murphy

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

Focusing first on Welty’s “A Worn Path” then Morrison’s Home, this chapter discusses the authors’ treatment of landscape, which reverberates with lingering touches of racialized violence and trauma, ... More

Focusing first on Welty’s “A Worn Path” then Morrison’s Home, this chapter discusses the authors’ treatment of landscape, which reverberates with lingering touches of racialized violence and trauma, and identifies how black characters read and decode its various evocations. The characters’ ability to recognize trees as signposts of the lynched black male body demonstrates a political consciousness necessary for their survival. Trees in these works figure as totems of death and destruction and as potent life-forces, pointing expectantly toward survival and regeneration. Shifting from figurative burial to affirmative acts of intrusion and trespass, these texts’ protagonists defy the forces of immobilization and the stereotypical images of southern black women depicted in earlier pastoral formations. Ultimately, this chapter argues that Welty and Morrison reorient the apocalyptic visioning of the antipastoral by bending the arc toward resilience and resurrection, permitting their terrain to appear mutably as bleak and beautiful, frightening and futurist.Less

The Africanness of Classicism in the Work of Toni Morrison

Tessa Roynon

in African Athena: New Agendas

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison's engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature ... More

Building on recent scholarly interest in Toni Morrison's engagement with the classical tradition, this chapter demonstrates that her interest in the Africanness of classicism is a significant feature of novels she published both before and after the appearance of Bernal's Black Athena in 1987. It examines key vignettes in Sula, The Bluest Eye and Paradise, showing that though repeated engagement with Ovid's Metamorphoses the author asserts the confluence of African, Greek, and Roman cultures. Exploring her interest in the Nag Hammadi texts; in African‐American strategic appropriations of a performed ‘Egyptianness’; in Aesop; in the Antiquities collections at the Louvre; and in the work of other ‘diasporic classicists’ such as Wole Soyinka, it concludes that the Morrisonian oeuvre forms a significant contribution to recent reconceptualization of classical culture, and of the implications of this for modernity.Less

Spatialized Ontologies: Toni Morrison's Science Fiction Traces in Gothic Spaces

Jerrilyn McGregory

in Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010

This chapter offers a literary criticism of Toni Morrison's works in Gothic science fiction. It discusses the generic transformations in conjunction with the hybrid spaces in the amalgam of ... More

This chapter offers a literary criticism of Toni Morrison's works in Gothic science fiction. It discusses the generic transformations in conjunction with the hybrid spaces in the amalgam of narratives. The chapter further notes that ‘enchantment’ is an adaptation of Darko Suvin's cognitive enstrangement, and that it is used when fantastical devices are used to express the cruel truths of a reality.Less

Talking Books (Talking Back)

Yogita Goyal

in Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery

This chapter takes up questions of literary ventriloquism and surrogate authorship that always plagued the slave narrative and are imaginatively reinvented by such black Atlantic writers as Toni ... More

This chapter takes up questions of literary ventriloquism and surrogate authorship that always plagued the slave narrative and are imaginatively reinvented by such black Atlantic writers as Toni Morrison and Caryl Phillips in their revisiting of Shakespeare’s Othello. To do so, they return to the founding scene of the “Talking Book” of the Atlantic slave narrative, where the slave worries that the master’s book will not speak to him or her. Staging a range of responses to analogy, these writers place slavery next to colonialism and the Holocaust, renovating but also complicating a classic postcolonial project of writing back to the empire in order to decolonize the mind. Their explorations return us to the meaning of slavery itself, its singularity, its relation to narrative, and to modern conceptions of racial formation. Such efforts transform the classic project of writing back to the text of Western authority, evenly negotiating the pull of influence, intertextuality, and adaptation.Less

“And now she was different”: Sexuality and differentiation among Black Women in Quicksand, Passing, and Sula

Helena Michie

in Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture

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 ... More

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.Less

New Directions for the Migration Narrative: Thoughts on Jazz

Farah Jasmine Griffin

in Who Set You Flowin?: The African-American Migration Narrative

The chapter focuses on summarizing the points clarified in this book by reviewing a single migration narrative, Tomi Morrison's novel — Jazz. The literary form depicts the positive and negative ... More

The chapter focuses on summarizing the points clarified in this book by reviewing a single migration narrative, Tomi Morrison's novel — Jazz. The literary form depicts the positive and negative effects of migration. Such phenomenon ends in crisis and creativity for the African Americans.Less

Enslaved Women’s Resistance and Survival Strategies in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio” and Toni Morrison’S Beloved and Margaret Garner

Kristine Yohe

in Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner

This chapter examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's 1857 poem “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, and Morrison's 2004 libretto Margaret Garner. Through ... More

This chapter examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's 1857 poem “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, and Morrison's 2004 libretto Margaret Garner. Through examining the various interpretations of Margaret Garner's history in the poem, novel, and opera, it becomes clear that her rebellious act resulted in metaphorical cultural survival even though her daughter did not literally survive. In other words, through the sacrifice of her child, Garner transcended her bondage, exerting her claim for maternal power over the tomb of institutional subjugation. Moreover, through asserting her right to decide what happened to her children, Garner defied slavery by surrendering the physical flesh in order to allow the metaphysical spirit to survive. Through these different genres, Harper and Morrison reconfigure the circumstances of Garner's decision, with powerful effect.Less

Introduction

Tessa Roynon

in Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture

This introductory chapter positions the argument of this book in relation to recent scholarship in the field of ‘black classicism’. It posits the ‘strategic ambivalence’ of Morrison's classicism, ... More

This introductory chapter positions the argument of this book in relation to recent scholarship in the field of ‘black classicism’. It posits the ‘strategic ambivalence’ of Morrison's classicism, outlining the dominant cultural uses of the classical tradition in definitions of American history and identity with which the text takes issue, and suggesting that the novelist's allusiveness is fundamental to the critical intervention in the politics of race and gender that her oeuvre constitutes. The chapter discusses prior scholarship on Morrison's classicism and presents an overview of the role of classics in Morrison's intellectual formation, and of her own discussion of the classical tradition in essays, interviews, and speeches. Finally, it outlines the book's argument regarding the key narratives of American history that Morrison's classicism transforms.Less

Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Space and the Rhetoric of Broadcasting

Paul Giles

in The Global Remapping of American Literature

This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the ... More

This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the sway of network corporations to one in which the incremental fragmentation of the increasingly global media market posed a challenge to the rhetoric of national space. It considers how the spatial dynamics inherent within American culture have been represented in American writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, and contrasts this with the perspectives of a younger generation, in particular those of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. It explains how the “Voice of America” (VOA), the official radio and television service of the U.S. federal government, became “the nation's ideological arm of anti-communism,” while the minds of supposedly free-thinking citizens at home were also shaped surreptitiously by the new power of electronic media.Less

Specters on Staircases: Race, Property, and the Gothic in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by ... More

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.Less

Introduction: There’s a Little Wheel a Turnin’ in My Heart: Cultural Concentricities and Enduring Identities

K. Zauditu-Selassie

in African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the African spiritual tradition contained in the novels of African American novelist Toni Morrison. This book aims to ... More

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the African spiritual tradition contained in the novels of African American novelist Toni Morrison. This book aims to affirm and demonstrate the power of Morrison's prose to re-codify these Central African beliefs along with other African-derived belief systems and sacred memories and examines how her novelistic figurations impart vital information and reinforce historical and spiritual consciousness. It explores the connection between identity and the concept of home, explains the concept of the healer and other spiritual manifestations mediated through the ritual activities and addresses historical records and the need to trace and record memories to ensure a viable future.Less

“Risking Sensuality”: Toni Morrison’s Erotics of Writing

Claudine Raynaud

in Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century

Writing the erotic is what Morrison has been risking throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1986), Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a theme, but part and ... More

Writing the erotic is what Morrison has been risking throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1986), Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a theme, but part and parcel of what writing ventures. Incest, pedophilia, rape, pornography, gang bangs — in Lorde’s words: “abuse of feeling” — and the constant probing of “love” — the title of Morrison’s eighth novel — go hand in hand with a reclaiming of the erotic, constitutive of the black subject (in writing), crucial to its survival and correlative to its freedom. Where Lorde offers a manifesto for a women-identified politics of the erotic, Morrison's fiction risks a poetics of the erotic against (and with) violence and trauma. How does her text summon up sensuality in relation to sexual difference and historical violence? How does it write “black” desire? Is there a progression throughout her oeuvre? If Jazz sets up an erotics of reading in keeping with Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, the “lustre of poetry” must always be contained by the space(s) left for the other, encompassed by the sublimity of “word-work” that fights the death of language (Nobel Lecture, 1993). Less

Wetlands, Swamps, and Bayous: Bodies of Resistance in Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

Anissa Janine Wardi

in Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective

This chapter maps the geographic and political contours of a water-saturated topography long associated with death, disease, and “blackness,” paying specific attention to swamps in Toni Morrison's ... More

This chapter maps the geographic and political contours of a water-saturated topography long associated with death, disease, and “blackness,” paying specific attention to swamps in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and bayous in Kasi Lemons' Eve's Bayou. That both elements—land and water—co-exist, layer, and overlap to the point of being indistinguishable from one another engenders a theory of reading geographies, bodies, and texts as resisting hegemonic labeling and classification. In this way, marshes, swamps, and bayous—as well as those who inhabit these uncharted territories—are read as powerful sites of postcolonial resistance.Less

Contradictory Directives and the Erotics of Re-membering: New World Spiritual Practices and Black Female Subjectivity in Beloved

Donna Aza Weir-Soley

in Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings

This chapter traces and substantiates Toni Morrison's use of African and African New World religions in Beloved through essays written by Morrison, an interview between Morrison scholars that ... More

This chapter traces and substantiates Toni Morrison's use of African and African New World religions in Beloved through essays written by Morrison, an interview between Morrison scholars that demonstrates Morrison's research into the ethnographic studies of Robert Farris Thompson in preparation for writing Beloved, and through The Black Book, which was edited by Morrison long before Beloved was written. It then analyzes the sign systems of Haitian Voudoun in Morrison's text through a nexus of spiritual symbols and images that permeate the work. Morrison also consolidates several important features of West African belief systems from Yoruba cosmology in Beloved. The figure of Amy Denver, the working-class white woman in the novel, embodies characteristics of Yoruba goddesses Yemonja and Oshun. But perhaps no other passage in Beloved invokes New World religious signification more profoundly than the lovemaking scene between Beloved and Paul D.Less

Introduction

Yvette Christiansë

in Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about the works of African American novelist Toni Morrison. The book offers a reading of Morrison's writing based on her own ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about the works of African American novelist Toni Morrison. The book offers a reading of Morrison's writing based on her own efforts to find a language that resists history and its clichés, while making that history visible as the history of a language. It analyzes how Morrison transformed her thematics into an ethical poetics that increasingly tries to understand the relation of her writing to the production or reproduction of a canon and examines her fictions in terms of their “internal” operations and their intertextual relations.Less

Toni Morrison’s Sacramental Rememory

Erin Michael Salius

in Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature

Chapter 1 considers two novels by Toni Morrison which are widely celebrated for undermining Enlightenment rationalism: Beloved and A Mercy. As critics often note, Morrison’s concept of rememory—an ... More

Chapter 1 considers two novels by Toni Morrison which are widely celebrated for undermining Enlightenment rationalism: Beloved and A Mercy. As critics often note, Morrison’s concept of rememory—an antirealist trope, premised on the supernatural irruption of the past in the present—achieves this by imagining an alternative history of slavery. Yet a complete picture of these novels requires an account of the way that Morrison structures rememory—quite remarkably and with palpable historical reservations—as a Catholic sacrament. The chapter therefore addresses a significant gap in scholarship on Morrison (who identifies as Catholic), but never does it imply that her religious vision is uncritical or pure. Rather, it suggests that the sacramental aspects of rememory are in constant tension with the sharp critique of Catholicism evident in both novels. That critique builds upon the sociological study of slave religion that Orlando Patterson developed in Slavery and Social Death, particularly his pioneering claim that “the special version of Protestantism” which arose in the American South as slave religion was, in key respects, theologically “identical” to Catholicism.Less

Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Mae G. Henderson

in Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual ... More

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.Less