Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to \"put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature\". Author of \"Beloved\", \"The Bluest Eye\", \"Song of Solomon\", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

This essay, situated within the theoretical framework authorizing the juxtaposed readings of African-American and white women writers, interrogates the narrative methods by which Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison incorporate their readers in the search for understanding in To the Lighthouse and Jazz. Using dislocations in time and space, free indirect discourse, polyphonic narrative voices, and skeins of freighted images, these texts problematize memory, history and knowledge. Because sites of narration are mystified and perhaps unreliable, readers are encouraged to become co-creators of the narratives by interpreting the submerged and difficult histories that that have shaped characters and circumstances.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v052/52.1lilienfeld.pdf

"To have the reader work with the author": The Circulation of Knowledge in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Toni Morrison's Jazz

This thesis examines the trope of 'dislocation' within the later novels of Toni Morrison, identifying it as central to her representation ot African American history and experience. Organising my project around the theme and figure of dislocation allows me to bring together diverse considerations such as those of the geographical, communal, familial, cultural, corporeal and narrative displacements that preoccupy Morrison's fiction. Developing a line of enquiry neglected within the field of scholarship addressing Morrison's work, most importantly my thesis finds this term useful for negotiating the author's engagement with the diaspora engendered by racial slavery. In particular, it explores her evocation of the black diaspora as a configuration encompassing sites of remembering, affirmation and potentiality as well as processes of displacement, disruption, deracination and loss.
My research is informed by a broad range of critical resources but especially Edouard Glissant's and Paul Gilroy's theories of diasporic interaction. Tracing symbolic spatial trajectories and enabling and disabling relationships to the past, I investigate Morrison's imaginary in terms of a black Atlantic of roots and routes, patterns of traversal, connection and exchange. Rejecting a narrowly defined notion of African American Studies, this thesis seeks to extend the ways in which Morrison's novels are approached, locating in them a truly diasporic vision.

"Shuttles in the rocking loom of history": dislocation in Toni Morrison's fiction

And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.... (Barnes & Noble Paradise website; my emphasis) Many reviews and critical analyses of Paradise, Toni Morrison's seventh novel, note that it is the final novel of a trilogy, beginning with Beloved and continuing with Jazz. (1) And while many of these reviews contend that Morrison has written pivotal chapters in African-American migrations, the trilogy maintains a much deeper connection: that of the cycle of life itself. (2) With Paradise, Morrison demonstrates unequivocally that death is a necessary condition of and for life; that is, the acceptance of mortality is a critical aspect of life's and death's journeys. The trilogy's first novel, Beloved, is replete with birth imagery, from Sethe's "water-breaking" following the carnival to Paul D's "re-birth" through mud in Georgia. And yet Morrison makes abundantly clear that birth is intricately interwoven with both life and death. Beloved, Seth, Paul D, and Denver flee or hide from life throughout most of Beloved, so each must be reborn by accepting and experiencing the painful conditions of life. Likewise, the second novel of the trilogy, Jazz, contains a multitude of metaphors for life. The music is alive, the photograph of Dorcas that Violet places on the mantle becomes alive with its own personality, and even the narrator of Jazz takes on life. Yet Joe and Violet merely go through the motions of life rather than truly live. When the dying Dorcas asks Felice to tell Joe that "There is only one apple," she reminds him that life does not exist without death; the "fall" of Adam and Eve, while condemning eaters to mortality, also endows them with the knowledge of life. To refuse that knowledge is to refuse life. Paradise completes the cycle with explorations of death. The citizens of Ruby have re-created Eden to their own specifications; and like the original death-less Eden, nobody dies in Ruby. Yet nobody "lives" in Ruby either, as the town exists within the isolated parameters of its citizens' powerfully executed will. By allowing no outside encroachment, Ruby remains dead to change, static. As Patricia Cato observes, there are no "new" stories in Ruby; only the founding narratives exist, told endlessly by the men. Richard Misner likewise wonders, "But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on" (161). Peter Widdowson notes, "Ruby, 'immortally' frozen in its own stasis, has no politics because the very conception of change is a contradiction in terms: the town is ideal because it cannot change, and it cannot change because it is ideal" (329). Seventeen miles away, another "paradise" has arisen. Inhabited by women who have fled from their lives (or deaths), the Convent--a building that Ruby's men see as "dark and malevolently disconnected from God's earth"--represents another kind of sanctuary of death (18). There the women, who have all experienced a "death of love," (3) learn to accept self-love. Their supposed "jangling" and "Jezebel" life disturbs the males of Ruby, and thus these men plan to kill the Convent women, although in truth, Consolata's recognition of the women as "broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying" is a more appropriate description (222). Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas are suspended in stasis, women in hiding, attempting a condition-less existence. Consolata believes, "Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything" (222). Unlike the sin of forgetting the past so prevalent in Beloved and Jazz, the inhabitants of Ruby--and its female double--refuse to let go of the past, to let time soften the edges of history's indignities; they deny the processes of death and regeneration. After all, most of its residents are dead long before Ruby's men raid the Convent. …

"Passing On" Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison's Paradise

It is a mark of an author's status as "major" when we begin to periodize their work. William Faulkner, Adrienne Rich, William Butler Yeats, Gwendolyn Brooks, and T.S. Eliot are among the major authors for whose ouevres periods have been suggested. Toni Morrison's body of work is large enough, and her achievements notable enough, that it seems appropriate to periodize her work. While literary criticism of Toni Morrison's novels has generally acknowledged differences between her early and more recent work, there is a more radical shift in her oeuvre than has been articulated. Morrison's complex relationship to colonization is radically transformed from her early to more recent work. Periodizing Morrison's work in relationship to her process of decolonization clarifies differences between her early and more recent periods and stresses her development across her oeuvre. This approach also gives a central role to Tar Baby, a role not accessible within current frames. Such a project--periodizing Morrison--has profound implications for both teaching and research. When Morrison's work is taught as a whole, as in a major author's course, periodization will affect the way in which the novels are grouped conceptually, the selection of themes and literary techniques to be investigated, even determining which novels would not be taught once her body of work expands further. When one of her novels is taught as part of a survey course in American fiction, women's writing, or African American literature, periodization will affect which one of her novels would be selected as representative. In terms of research, periodization will provide a focus to the discourse and encourage a shared vocabulary instead of the disparate theoretical discourses now in place.(1) What I want to begin here is a call/response dynamic on the issue of Morrison's canon and its periods, and I hope my call generates many responses. The conversation on periodizing Morrison should be exciting and multi-voiced; I do not intend the periodization I probe exciting and multi-voiced; I do not intend the periodization. I propose here as a final product. One of the central concerns throughout Morrison's work is colonization.(2) Her early work struggles with the effects of colonization on African American individuals and the community, while her later work moves into an exploration of decolonized African American culture and history. In this context, her fourth novel, Tar Baby, assumes a rich significance. Understanding the importance of Tar Baby to Morrison's distancing from the colonizing effects of Euro-American culture is central to understanding how the novel divides her early and later works. Tar Baby seems an unlikely choice for pre-eminence in the Morrison canon. It is, after all, the least admired, least researched, and least taught of her novels. It has been called her "most problematic and unresolved novel" (Peterson 471) and has received little critical attention generally, and virtually no critical attention in the past five years.(3) Few of us teach it, choosing the shorter, "woman-oriented" Sula, or the richer, male quest patterned Song of Solomon, or the current favorite, the cathartic Beloved. Yet perhaps Tar Baby seems problematic and unsatisfying to many of us precisely because it functions as a transitional text in Morrison's oeuvre. Viewed in this light, Tar Baby's ambivalences, refusal of answers, and weaknesses in plot and characterization reveal tensions in Morrison's process as a writer; the novel offers maximum insight into both her periods. Tar Baby's central concern is colonization.(4) The island hierarchy at the beginning of the novel reinscribes the classic colonial schema, with the white colonizer, Philadelphia exile Valerian Street, presiding over a household empire that includes a beautiful wife, Margaret, a black "assistant," Jadine, black servants, Ondine and Sydney, and occasional employees from the island, Gideon and Therese. …

Periodizing Toni Morrison's Work from 'The Bluest Eye' to 'Jazz': The Importance of 'Tar Baby.'

Toni Morrison has always been a jazz musician, not only because she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of great African works, but also and primarily because she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of her own canon.1 Because Morrison is concerned with and committed to African people, she uses each of her novels as a framework for investigating various solutions to the African's class exploitation and race and gender oppression. This thematic investigation is always enhanced by narrative structure. Theme and structure work together as theory and practice in an effort to highlight, and pose solutions to, the problems African people confront.2 Jazz continues this tradition of signifying, assimilating, and advancing the mutuality of theme and structure. In her latest novel, structure does not just enhance theme, it is theme. Just as in jazz, the story and the telling of the story are one, so in Jazz, theme and structure blend together to suggest the unity that must exist among African people. The reader Is first made aware of this unifying process in the inscription:

Doreatha Drummond Mbalia

Papers

Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz