Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing

This perceptive if esoteric study from Mobley (Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison), an English professor at Case Western Reserve University, examines how Toni Morrison’s novels investigate the significance of literal and figurative “spaces.” Mobley argues that Jazz explores how place shapes identity by following a woman who blames a violent outburst on the alienation she felt after moving from Virginia to Harlem in the 1920s. Morrison’s fiction “creates spaces... to interrogate the meaning” of history, Mobley contends, positing that The Bluest Eye’s epigraph, an “excerpt from an elementary school primer that contains a description of home as a physical space that is a normalized space of whiteness,” calls attention to the white supremacist narratives that dominated schoolbooks for much of American history. Elsewhere, Mobley suggests that the Nobel winner employed disorienting prose in Beloved to mimic the mental state of the book’s grieving protagonist and expounds on how characters in Sula and Song of Solomon navigate the “space” between how others view them and how they see themselves. Mobley is a capable interpreter of Morrison’s oeuvre, but the determination to connect every observation back to “spaces,” most of which are metaphorical (“hyper-visible space of trauma”; “deep psychic spaces”; “space of metanarrative”), stretches the word beyond coherent meaning. Still, literature scholars will appreciate the insights into Morrison’s fiction. (July)