Morrison and African-American History and Tradition

It is impossible to appreciate the depth and complexity of Toni Morrison’s work without some knowledge of the depth and complexity of African-American history and tradition. Given that in the eyes of the world this author is one of the faces of black American culture, to argue that the ways she expresses and critiques that culture is at the heart of her fiction may sound like an empty truism. Moreover, the divisions of this chapter – between “African-American,” “American,” and “African” contexts– rely to some extent on false distinctions and falsify the vision of a novelist who eschews the simplistic “either/or” perspective in favor of the sophisticated “both ... and.” With this in mind, my hope is that the last section of this chapter, “Morrison, Transnational Perspectives, Modernism, and Postmodernism,” resolves the limitations of the preceding categories: it demonstrates the author’s central role in the intellectual movements of recent decades that transcend boundaries of national and racial identity. Nonetheless, as one of Morrison’s greatest achievements is to combine universalism with a specific engagement with black experience, it is important to establish some of the particularities of African-American history, folk tradition, religion, music, literature, and art that have shaped her work and that she continues to shape.

Morrison has written of her “reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture” (BE np). In illuminating some of those “codes” and their presences in her novels, this chapter presents a brief chronological overview of the changing status of people of African descent in America, and of their always-evolving artistic forms. While Morrison’s fiction is absolutely rooted in black traditions, it is of course never simply a mouthpiece or vehicle of propaganda promoting some vague notion of “black worth.” While the author obviously participates in the ongoing African-American struggle for genuine emancipation and equality, her novels never blindly endorse the forms that that struggle has taken. Her approach to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, for example, or to the Black Power movement of the 1960s is one of analysis and critical engagement rather than wholehearted celebration. She looks behind and beyond the prevailing myths of black history as well as white, perhaps no more so than in her attention to the experience of black women, in the positioning of women and girls at the center of her novels.