Transcript Slide 1
ACL1001: Reading Contemporary
Fiction
Lecture 10: Toni Morrison and Black
Writing
The Harlem Renaissance
Writers and artists: such as Jean Toomer, Zora
Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Langston
Hughes
These writers and artists were associated with
the National Association for the Advancement of
Coloured People (NAACP) and the Urban League
They were also influenced by black intellectuals,
such as James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B Du
Bois
(Wintz, 1988)
Post-Emancipation
Racial segregation
Discrimination in the workplace: domestic service
and unskilled labour
Ideology of racism – Anglo-saxon racial
superiority
African-American troops in the World Wars
Race riots
Theodore Roosevelt: said that lynchings occurred
because of ‘black sexual assaults on white
women’
(Wintz, p. 7)
The Black Southern Writer’s Experience
Alice Walker, 1984, In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens.
Community e.g midwifery; solidarity
Division between country and city; north and
south
Writing influenced by Harlem Renaissance writers
and also Black consciousness/rights activists,
such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B Du Bois, and
Martin Luther King
Families – fighting against racism
(Walker,1984, 19)
Heritage
Walker writes that the Black writer has inherited:
‘a compassion for the earth, a trust in humanity
beyond our knowledge of evil, and an abiding
love of justice. We inherit a great responsibility
as well, for we must give voice to centuries not
only of silent bitterness and hate but also of
neighbourly kindness and sustaining love’ p. 21
Black Nationalist Movement
1960s/1970s – emphasized racial stability and
solidarity
Black female writers such as Toni Morrison and
Alice Walker insisted that nation-building had to
include the realities of Black women’s lives
‘Collectively, these writers foregrounded the
challenges that violence poses to women’s
subjectivity, identity, and understanding of self in
social environments that marginalize women’s
experiences with abuse and victimization’ (Davis,
2005)
African-American Writing
Slave narratives
Retelling and rewriting history
Oral tradition
Family relationships: the lives of ordinary people
Gender relations
Toni Morrison
Born 18 Feb, 1931
Graduated from Howard University, 1953
Taught at Texas Southern University
Textbook Editor - Random House
Currently, professor at Princeton
University
Nobel Laureate – 1993.
Interview with Jana Wendt - 1998
Wendt: You have in your writing certainly
marginalized whites. Why are they of no
particular interest to you?
Morrison: I was interested in another kind of
literature that was not just confrontational, black
versus white. I was really interested in black
readership.
Wendt: You don’t think you will ever change and
write books that incorporate white lives into them
substantially?
Morrison: I have done.
Wendt: Substantially?
Morrison: You can’t understand how powerfully
racist that question is, can you? Because you
would never ask a white author, ‘When are you
going to write about black people?’
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison ‘sets out to write the novels which
she wanted to read; novels which dealt with
Black lives and Black history’ (Wisker, 2000,
p.56)
Morrison’s novels counter canonical narratives;
they oppose the ethnocentrism of the US literary
establishment; they interrogate race myths; they
deal with the issues of justice and civil rights;
they draw on cultural and emotional memory
(Morrison, 2003).
Song of Solomon
Magic Realism
Mythology/Oral Tradition: Flying Africans
Orality and Literacy
Ancestors/Community