Baillie, Justine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0056-9155 (2020) Introduction: Global Morrison. Contemporary Women's Writing, 13 (3). pp. 253-269. ISSN 1754-1476 (Print), 1754-1484 (Online) (doi:10.1093/cww/vpaa008)

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Abstract

As novelist, academic, and public intellectual Toni Morrison has made a profound contribution to the transformation of the black intellectual and political aesthetic. This transformation has meant a revision of the essentialist race consciousness of the 1960s and a move towards representations of identity that can transcend codifications of race, class and gender. In many ways Morrison’s literary and theoretical formulations represent the feminization of black writing traditions through her representations of identity as being fluid and socially constructed. Her pedagogical purpose was to provide an alternative history from which valuable knowledge can be drawn and new possibilities for individual and communal existence conceived and constructed. In achieving this, Morrison’s fiction is never prescriptive but instead her dialogical project necessitates the reader’s participation in the creation of the communally authored text. Her novels transform memory into alternative narratives of recovery that illuminate obscured histories of slavery, migration and urbanisation. Trauma and oppression are mediated in her work, to be passed on as the means for recovery from the past and as a counter discourse to the obfuscation of truth that operates, for Morrison, at the heart of imperial archival history. This project constitutes a rich legacy for a new generation of writers who, working within a global nexus, interrogate the racial economics of trauma, dislocation and exile in ways that dissolve the distinctions between African American, colonial, and postcolonial studies. Morrison herself looked to the diaspora for “creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions of globalism, diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions”

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Volume 13, Issue 3, November 2019 - SPECIAL ISSUE: GLOBAL MORRISON
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Toni Morrison, globalization and literature, Black Atlantic Transnation
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS)
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	20 Apr 2021 21:22
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/27947

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