Madhu Dubey
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226167268
- eISBN:
- 9780226167282
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226167282.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Jerrilyn McGregory
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846317071
- eISBN:
- 9781846319785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846317071.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
K. Zauditu-Selassie
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813033280
- eISBN:
- 9780813039060
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813033280.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as ...
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Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.Less
Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.
Tessa Roynon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199595006
- eISBN:
- 9780191731464
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.003.0023
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, African History: BCE to 500CE
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 ...
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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
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.
Kristine Yohe
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252037900
- eISBN:
- 9780252095160
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252037900.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691136134
- eISBN:
- 9781400836512
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691136134.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Helena Michie
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195073874
- eISBN:
- 9780199855223
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195073874.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195088960
- eISBN:
- 9780199855148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195088960.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Claudine Raynaud
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846319389
- eISBN:
- 9781781380901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846319389.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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).
K. Zauditu-Selassie
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813033280
- eISBN:
- 9780813039060
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813033280.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Tessa Roynon
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199698684
- eISBN:
- 9780191760532
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199698684.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, American History: pre-Columbian BCE to 500CE
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, ...
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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
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.
Adrienne Lanier Seward and Justine Tally (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781628460193
- eISBN:
- 9781626740419
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628460193.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning includes essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production ...
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Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning includes essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona, and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s work. In fact, in Home we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to or engage themes prevalent in Home and to use quotes from this latest novel as headings for the five different sections of this volume. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in works that have now become classics in world literature. Not only do they enhance the breadth and depth of Morrison studies but they shift the paradigms for scholarship in religion, history, classical mythology, psychology, folklore, law and philosophy. The essays are divided into 5 sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two original, previously unpublished poems, written specifically for this volume in honor of Ms. Morrison: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Abayere Babo, Abayere Babo, Abayere Babo.” (235 words)Less
Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning includes essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona, and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s work. In fact, in Home we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to or engage themes prevalent in Home and to use quotes from this latest novel as headings for the five different sections of this volume. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in works that have now become classics in world literature. Not only do they enhance the breadth and depth of Morrison studies but they shift the paradigms for scholarship in religion, history, classical mythology, psychology, folklore, law and philosophy. The essays are divided into 5 sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two original, previously unpublished poems, written specifically for this volume in honor of Ms. Morrison: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Abayere Babo, Abayere Babo, Abayere Babo.” (235 words)
Anissa Janine Wardi
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780813037455
- eISBN:
- 9780813042343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813037455.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Donna Aza Weir-Soley
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813033778
- eISBN:
- 9780813039008
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813033778.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Erin Michael Salius
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056890
- eISBN:
- 9780813053677
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056890.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 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 ...
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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
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.
Mae G. Henderson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195116595
- eISBN:
- 9780199375219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195116595.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, Women's Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Yvette Christiansë
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823239153
- eISBN:
- 9780823239191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239153.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Terrence L. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195383980
- eISBN:
- 9780199897469
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383980.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religion
Chapter Four examines the literary use of death in Du Bois’s short stories and essays, as well as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Death is a signifier that points to the bloody consequences of antiblack ...
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Chapter Four examines the literary use of death in Du Bois’s short stories and essays, as well as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Death is a signifier that points to the bloody consequences of antiblack racism and the price we must pay to achieve justice and freedom.Less
Chapter Four examines the literary use of death in Du Bois’s short stories and essays, as well as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Death is a signifier that points to the bloody consequences of antiblack racism and the price we must pay to achieve justice and freedom.
Tuire Valkeakari
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813062471
- eISBN:
- 9780813051963
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813062471.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Mae G. Henderson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195116595
- eISBN:
- 9780199375219
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195116595.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, Women's Literature
Deploying the trope of “speaking in tongues” to theorize the multivocality of black women’s writing, based on the reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as critical concept, this book ...
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Deploying the trope of “speaking in tongues” to theorize the multivocality of black women’s writing, based on the reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as critical concept, this book also enlists a second trope, “dancing diaspora,” to theorize the narrativity of black women’s dance, based on the notions of “performing testimony” and “critical witnessing.” Together, these tropes are meant to signify a tradition of black women writing and performing, a tradition privileging the preeminence of voice and narration, along with the roles of listening and witnessing. The book demonstrates how the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones, and Nella Larsen, along with the performances of Josephine Baker and the contemporary video dancer, work to deconstruct dominant and hegemonic traditions through such acts as disruption and revision, conjuration, narrative insurgency, parody, mimesis, witnessing, and “misperformance.” Central to the book’s critical vision is the notion that discourse and other signifying practices must work to dismantle the demarcation between speech and writing, the cultural and social, literature and performance. Its second critical presumption is that their complex subjectivity uniquely positions black women writers and performers to privilege and give contestatory, testimonial, and diasporic expression to difference and identity. The coda stages an imaginary meeting between Toni Morrison and Josephine Baker—writer and performer separated across time, space, and culture—meeting on common ground in the project of disrupting and dismantling dominant chains of signification by way of “speaking in tongues” and “dancing diaspora.”Less
Deploying the trope of “speaking in tongues” to theorize the multivocality of black women’s writing, based on the reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as critical concept, this book also enlists a second trope, “dancing diaspora,” to theorize the narrativity of black women’s dance, based on the notions of “performing testimony” and “critical witnessing.” Together, these tropes are meant to signify a tradition of black women writing and performing, a tradition privileging the preeminence of voice and narration, along with the roles of listening and witnessing. The book demonstrates how the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones, and Nella Larsen, along with the performances of Josephine Baker and the contemporary video dancer, work to deconstruct dominant and hegemonic traditions through such acts as disruption and revision, conjuration, narrative insurgency, parody, mimesis, witnessing, and “misperformance.” Central to the book’s critical vision is the notion that discourse and other signifying practices must work to dismantle the demarcation between speech and writing, the cultural and social, literature and performance. Its second critical presumption is that their complex subjectivity uniquely positions black women writers and performers to privilege and give contestatory, testimonial, and diasporic expression to difference and identity. The coda stages an imaginary meeting between Toni Morrison and Josephine Baker—writer and performer separated across time, space, and culture—meeting on common ground in the project of disrupting and dismantling dominant chains of signification by way of “speaking in tongues” and “dancing diaspora.”
