Transcript Toni Morrison - University of Texas at Austin

Toni Morrison
•Born Chloe Anthony Wofford,
February 18, 1931, in Lorain,
OH
•Married Harold Morrison,
1958 (divorced, 1964). She
has two children: Harold Ford
and Slade Kevin
•Education:Howard
University, B.A., 1953; Cornell
University, M.A., 1955
Morrison’s Career
•After working as a housemaid and her college
years, Morrison became an Instructor in English at
Texas Southern University, Houston, TX (1955-57)
and then moved to Howard University 1957-64.
•Senior Editor: Random House, New York, NY, senior
editor, 1965-85
•Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993
•Since the publication of The Bluest Eye, Morrison
has held professorships and lecturer positions at
SUNY, Princeton, Yale, Bard, Cambridge, and
Harvard.
Morrison’s Works
Fiction:
The Bluest Eye, Holt (New York, NY), 1969, reprinted, Plume (New York, NY), 1994.
Sula, Knopf (New York, NY), 1973.
Song of Solomon, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977.
Tar Baby, Knopf (New York, NY), 1981.
“Recitatif” appears in Confirmation: Anthology of African American Women
Writers. Ed. Amiri and Amina Baraka. New York: Morrow, 1983.
Dreaming Emmett (play), first produced in Albany, NY, January 4, 1986.
Beloved, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.
Jazz, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.
Paradise, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.
Love, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.
A Mercy-- 2008
Non-Fiction:
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Harvard University
Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992.
Morrison has also edited a number of books, some of which include: Race-ing
Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the
Construction of Social Reality, and (With Claudia Brodsky Lacour) Birth of a
Nation'Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, Pantheon (New
On Recitatif
Neither blackness nor 'people of color' stimulates me in notions
of excessive, limitless love, or routine dread. I cannot rely on
these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer
struggling with and through a language that can powerfully
evoke and enforce signs of racial superiority, cultural
hegemony, and dismissive "othering" of people and language
which are by no means marginal or already and completely
known and knowable in my work.
My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than
demonizing it; villifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The
kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn
how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its
sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable
employment of racially informed and determined chains. (The
only short story I have ever written, "Recitatif," was an
experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative
about two characters of different races for whom racial identity
is crucial).
--Playing in the Dark