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This book examines Toni Morrison’s highly influential works through the lens of philanthropy. The point of departure of this endeavor is the keen observation that philanthropy has always played a leading role in US discourses about the nation itself. While doing so, time and again philanthropy has also been used as a means of social stratification – especially for so-called social minorities such as the African American community, whose historical experience within the United States is at the very heart of Morrison’s novels. This book pursues the goal of a twofold understanding – on the one hand, through offering a rather innovative access to Morrison’s works, the project allows for new insights into one of today’s most influential authors. On the other hand, this book explores the productivity of the concept of philanthropy for literary and cultural studies – a concept hitherto largely neglected by scholars in both academic fields.
Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels, revealing each novel's unconventional idea of love as expressed in a new and experimental narrative form.
Contributions by Alice Knox Eaton, Mar Gallego, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Shirley A. Stave, Justine Tally, Susana Vega-González, and Anissa Wardi In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returned to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. God Help the Child, published in 2015, is set in the contemporary period, unlike all of her previous novels. The contemporary setting is ultimately incidental to the project of the novel, however; as with Morrison’s other work, the story takes on ...
This study deals with the formative powers of modern liberal ideas of private property. The liberal subject emerged with the formations of European liberalism, Atlantic slavery, and settler colonial expansion in the New World. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is thus identified as a key literary text that generates a fundamental critique of the connections between self-making and private property at its 17th-century scene.
This work offers a connection between the concrete utopian theory of hope by the Gennan Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch and the literary productions of contemporary African American women writers. The study argues that these literary texts should be read as concrete utopias outlined in Bloch's major work The Principle ofHope. Bloch argues that when people become consciously aware of the dialectical tendencies in concrete utopias will they recognize the possibilities first for their own personal empowerment and then for their communities. As a result of their conscious awareness, readers will be able to perceive the visions of the texts and will begin to actively dream of becoming agents for c...
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Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. This comprehensive and accessible 2007 Companion, featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, was the first guide to her work to discuss her entire career as a writer, critic, editor and teacher.
The focus of this collection is the cultural and literary policy of the tripartite alliance (ANC, SACP, COSATU) after its denouncement of 'culture as a weapon'. Three shifts are noted between 1990 - 2000: the end of apartheid, the alliance's accession to power, and the change of presidency from Nelson Mandela to Thabo Mbeki, including the adoption of a neo-liberal macro-economic policy. The investigation stresses the importance of the role of writers and intellectuals in political and societal transformation processes that have a tendency to destroy the agency that initially set them in motion. Startling revelations are being made, which highlight the emptiness of much Rainbow Nation sloganeering.
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