Toni Morrison's Black Liberal Humanism (and other excerpts)
5/5
()
About this ebook
Jefferson questions whether Morrison is as politically progressive as has been widely assumed and probes why politically-minded literary critics have not noted the reactionary elements in her work.
He sees scholars as following Morrison's own theory of her work--that is, that it must be analyzed according to African American "structures" and linguistic forms to uncover Afro-American "values." This approach, he argues, simply rehabilitates the tenets of pre-1970s liberal humanism: that Morrison's text is a transparent window into these apparently timeless and universal black values.
Contains the introduction and first essay of the book Toni Morrison and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition. Also includes excerpts from the remainder of the book.
Related to Toni Morrison's Black Liberal Humanism (and other excerpts)
Related ebooks
The History of Black Studies Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPost Black: How a New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Black Consciousness Reader Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsForging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOf Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Future of Black Studies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New Negro Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDarkwater: Voices from Within the Veil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSay It Loud!: Great Speeches on Civil Rights and African American Identity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNew Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLet Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadows Uplifted Volume III: Black Women Authors of 19th Century American Poetry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Literary Criticism For You
The Art of Seduction: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/512 Rules For Life: by Jordan Peterson | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 48 Laws of Power: by Robert Greene | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man's Search for Meaning: by Viktor E. Frankl | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Court of Thorns and Roses: A Novel by Sarah J. Maas | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Verity: by Colleen Hoover | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret History: by Donna Tartt | Conversation Starters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAs I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.by Brené Brown | Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Circe: by Madeline Miller | Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer | Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5SUMMARY Of The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in Healthy Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Virtues Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bad Feminist: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moby Dick (Complete Unabridged Edition) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain | Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5
Reviews for Toni Morrison's Black Liberal Humanism (and other excerpts)
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Toni Morrison's Black Liberal Humanism (and other excerpts) - William A. Jefferson
The Introduction, main essay, and extended excerpts are all taken from Toni Morrison and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition, published in 2014.
Introduction
This book’s genesis lay in my realization that Toni Morrison’s writing often has been politically reactionary, although scholars, for the last thirty years, have written about Morrison as if she were the ideal progressive. This contradiction should be somewhat surprising. After all, the field of literary criticism underwent a pronounced politicization beginning in the 1970s. A new generation of scholars protested the structure of the 1950s English Department (which survived deep into the 1960s). Determined to disrupt the transmission of passive, elitist, conservative values, they proceeded on two lines of attack: (1) to enlarge the canon of great
books, which in the 1950s had been limited to mostly works authored by white men, and (2) to challenge the dominant mode of reading, liberal humanism, which had suppressed the political content of works and reproduced inequality by foreclosing any attempt to contest the text. Over the next thirty years, in a very fertile manner, these scholars attempted to overthrow both sources of oppression by broadening the canon and by offering alternate reading strategies.
These two challenges—to change what was read and how books were read—were often intertwined; but not necessarily so. As I have come to see while researching Morrison, they have diverged in the scholarship around her work. The first program, to broaden the canon, certainly spurred Morrison’s climb onto university reading lists in the 1990s so that, by the middle of the decade, she was one of the most taught authors in English departments. But the second challenge—to read works in ways that punctured the work’s purported naturalism, so that readers could contest or reject an author’s politics if need be—seems not to have been extended to Morrison’s work at all. Instead, judging by the scholarship written about her, Morrison is taught in ways that closely resemble the liberal humanist scholarship of the 1950s. The quest of liberal humanist scholars—to find what is timeless and universal in a purportedly transparent text—has often been the mainstay in Morrison criticism.
Needless to say, none of Morrison’s readers acknowledges that they are essentially offering liberal humanist readings of her work. Nor do they acknowledge that they are reading Morrison differently than other canonical authors. Although she now occupies a position of prominence in English studies in the United States, scholars have offered fairly apolitical readings of her fiction. They rarely contest her vision of African American history and experience; and, as a consequence, the politics of her fiction, which may or may not be progressive, receive little scrutiny.
How and why have literary scholars, steeped in leftwing politics for forty years, foregone critical examination of Morrison’s politics while concurrently elevating her to a position of power in literary studies? Searching for an answer has led to this book. And to answer it, we will have to keep in mind two overlapping, but by no means synonymous, phenomena: radical politics and liberal multiculturalism.
*
Radical political literary criticism post-1970 had one overriding principle—to liberate the reader. In order to make the reader a more critical, independent thinker, resistant to automatic absorption in the text’s politics, scholars first had to make visible the invisible assumptions underpinning the then-dominant mode of literary criticism: liberal humanism. Liberal humanist criticism, founded on the idea that the text was a transparent representation of timeless and universal experiences and values, sought to initiate students into a limited set of prescribed values. Helpfully removing the text from any historical context, liberal humanist professors pre-empted the reader’s ability to see how the author was polemically representing reality
by engaging with dominant discursive constructs at the time she was writing.
Radical critics reversed this process. Sinking the literary text into a discernible political context, they treated the literary work less as an authoritative window onto reality and more as an attempt by an author to engage in political controversies and, in the process, make history. Situating a work in this manner allowed readers not only to see the work’s politics but, if necessary, to contest them.
Yet, largely, Morrison scholars for several decades now have treated her work as authoritative windows onto reality. In addition, they have struggled to identify the politics in Morrison’s work apart from explaining what is specifically black about her text. Foregrounding this cultural specificity, scholars have then read Morrison for what she shows us
about the Afro-American experience, or black culture, or black female livelihood. They have emphasized the black cultural materials (myths, vernacular, African religions) with which she works. These critical projects, which seek to bring forth the work’s cultural specificity,
unfortunately, also naturalize the representations in the texts. To see that foregrounding the cultural specificity of Morrison’s work has been the mainstay of scholarship, reach anywhere on the groaning shelf of Morrison criticism. You will learn:
how Morrison’s confrontation with history has necessitated the development of oppositional forms of language
via a political project that privileges the specificity of African-American knowledge and linguistic forms
[1];
how [e]ach of Morrison’s novels explores manifestations of self and home, building on each other to retell the story of African American trauma
[2];
how "[a]s a Black Cultural Nationalist, Morrison validates black culture and reaffirms adaptive survival power, its creativity amidst oppression, life-affirming