Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon - Hardcover

Morrison, Toni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593802748 ISBN 13: 9780593802748

Verlag: Knopf, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity—these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

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TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

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Image of Blacks in Western Art

Studies in American Africanism is an investigation into two principal areas of discursive practice: one area involves the ways in which a non-­white, Africanist presence and persona was constructed in the United States; the second area involves the ways in which that fabricated “presence” served the literary imagination in its exploration of American identity.

The course uses the terms “Africanism” and “Africanist” to suggest the mythic construct of a denotative and connotative blackness, and an entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and mis-­readings of African peoples and their descendants in this country. Africanism is also the process of alienizing and exoticizing one’s own experience of Black people in order to know and therefore own that experience. [caveat] The course is not limited to an investigation of what might be called racist or non-­racist literature. Nor does the course take or encourage a position that confines itself to measuring the quality of a work based on the attitudes of the author, or the representations he or she makes of another racial or ethnic group. Such judgments can and are being made in recent literary criticisms. (For example, the critical scholarship of Ezra Pound, [Louis-­Ferdinand] Céline, George Jean Nathan, Paul de Man, etc.; and we know books are constantly being banned from library shelves for these alleged attitudes or representations or sensibilities regardless of past evaluations of the quality of the text. In fact, the argument has been advanced that, in the case of Paul de Man, say, or Mark Twain, the work can have no unmitigated quality precisely because the work—­or in some cases not the work but the author—­has been found to reveal insensitivity to ethnic, religious, sexual, or racial groups.)

However, although those judgments are within the reach of this course, they are not within its purview. One of the reasons the course does not close with analyses leading toward conclusions about a work’s being racist or non-­racist is that such an analysis can be an intellectual cul-­de-­sac—­once the evidence is in, there is nothing more to be said about the work.

What we propose to do is a series of close readings of traditional American fiction in order to discover what impact notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability have had on the literature. We will describe and analyze how this literature has behaved in its encounter with racial ideology and discover in what ways the literature has been shaped by that encounter.

Now in order to do this we will have to identify the instances during which American literature has been complicit in the development of racialism, and when it has intervened in racial discourse to undermine or explode it; but we will want to move beyond stark identification to the further investigation of what Africanism has meant for the work/product of the writer’s imagination. How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanistic “other”? What does the encounter with Africans and/or African-­Americans do to and for the work? How does one describe the rhetorical struggle that follows? Our study averts the gaze from the racialized object to the racialized subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers.

If Africanism is a construct, if “blackness” has “meaning,” then so does “whiteness.” One goal, then, becomes to discover how the concept of “whiteness” was built/invented/produced and what it is for. The insights we come up with may help us to discover not only the nature—­even the cause of “whiteness”—­but also the part that its development played in the evolution of something known, loosely, as an American. Reading and critiquing American literature from this point of view may also release the literature from the incoherence that the studied indifference and historical evasion in criticism has imposed on it. In other words, we will regard the literary engagements with Africanism as self-­reflexive—­as ways to talk about, imagine, and set forth/assert the deep concerns white writers have about themselves and the world they inhabit. Further, we will regard the presence of Africanism in a work as an impinging force in the execution of that work’s structure and figurative language.

The suspicion of the course is that the intrusion or inclusion of Africanistic characters is significant. That the writer’s choice to include or the necessity of inclusion can be shown sometimes to throttle the text, destabilize it, and, far more frequently than one would think, it can be shown to liberate it, to provide and force astonishing kinds of artistic creativity, astonishing leaps into otherwise forbidden territory, and that in the wake of this imaginative encounter, some interesting patterns emerge—­patterns that should be included in the history of American literature as part of its distinguishing features.

Two points require underscoring (one about knowledge and imagination, the other about language):

1) Although we will see that “knowing” the “other”—­the conviction that one “knows” Africans and African-­Americans—­is central to the construction of “whiteness” (knowing is, after all, the demonstration of power), we should not ever assume that the Africans and African-­Americans encountered in this fiction are in fact known—­they are imagined. Sartre’s description of colonialist language captures the point: “These phrases (terminology for the suborned natives) were never the translation of a real, concrete thought; they were not even the object of thought . . . they have not by themselves any meaning, at least in so far as they claim to express knowledge about the colonialized.” So we will not be looking for “real” or realistic representations of blacks within a construct based on stereotypes. (“Representation is how we make our will known.”) In the absence of race-­neutral knowledge, or open-­minded inquiry about Africans and African-­Americans, and in the presence of ideological and imperialistic rationales for oppression, an invented, fictive Africanist persona emerged, and flourished because of its serviceability. Political serviceability, of course, and economic serviceability, etc.; but it is the literary serviceability that we will focus on.

The Matter of Africanism, by which I mean the fabrication of an Africanistic Presence that would support, promulgate, and enhance the institution of slavery and the hierarchy of race, seems to be a dominant figuration within American literature. And it is important to remember that under the constraints of this fabrication, we can be only secondarily concerned here with the way Africans really were—­what their various cultures, laws, languages, and art forms were; nor with what African-­Americans were or are really like—­what kind of cultural, linguistic, artistic, and social forms they either preserved or created in the New World. “Real” Blacks “out of the loop.” In short, we are not concerned here, except indirectly, with all of what was available for these writers to see and interpret, but rather with what they believed they saw, or wished to see, and how in fact they did interpret a black “other” in their midst.

We will try to discover how the variables of racism—­biologic, economic, ideological, metaphoric, metaphysical—­can be understood in each of these formulations to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593802748
• ISBN 13: 9780593802748
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Herausgeber: Brodsky Claudia
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland