Latest News

Salzburg Global Fellow Emmanuelle Andrès analyzes how writer Toni Morrison's novels deconstruct the artificial borders produced by racism

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/785109361

This op-ed was written by Emmanuelle Andrès, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.  

The individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic: that’s what she does. Her questions and criticism are her work, and she is frequently in conflict with the status quo. But the artist can’t help that; if she is to have any integrity at all in her art, she can’t help it.  

Toni Morrison, The Individual Artist in "The Source of Self-Regard", 2019 

Throughout her writing career, Toni Morrison consistently asked ominous questions from her readers about identity, community, otherness, and the meaning of “home” in the face of mass movement, division, racism, and war; she addressed both actual borders and borders of the mind in her fiction and nonfiction. One of the main “tasks” of literature, theater, and cinema is precisely to make sure that the edge, the fence “where the most interesting things always happen” is the creative, real-imaginary locus for a reckoning. By telling stories that were often silenced or erased from public discourse, if not altogether rejected or banned*, Toni Morrison always chose to reckon with borders, vantage points from which to delve into the complexities of the human psyche and her global readers’ moral imaginations. Today, her literary legacy of border crossing - between the mythical and the real, the profane and the sacred, male and female subjects, black and white, north and south, past and present - endures, helping her readers come to an understanding of the world and its moral inhabitants. 

As a fiction writer and a critic, not only was Toni Morrison interested in border crossing, but she also strove to enact border erasure in her writing process: wanting the reader to ask herself or himself other questions than what gender or race the characters or narrators were (or any set feature that would limit the reader’s imaginary scope); she sought out the most intriguing elements in the world of fiction she most enjoyed, while she purposely chose to withhold set identifying features in her own fiction, preferring fluid, shifting boundaries, leaving the gates of fiction partially open, and “begging for entrance”. Let me give but one example, drawn from the very first sentences of "Paradise" (1997): “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." While these lines instantly caused, and are still causing, a lot of ink to flow, leading too many readers to limit their reading to finding clues as to who the “white girl” was, the novel urges the reader to ponder and question this very need**, focusing instead on the moral scandal of the Ruby men’s murderous expedition, who are unnamed at this stage and identified by their filiation only. In "Paradise", Morrison wanted to “de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was”. By way of the very first sentence of the novel, she asked - What would a world where gender-race-class signifiers were made invisible or pushed back, to make way for our understanding as moral inhabitants of this world – be like? How does art help to resist and erase societal borders? How does it help us reach out to those whom Toni Morrison does not identify as others, but as “versions of ourselves”? Indeed, “Beloved”, the ultimate “other”/border character in Toni Morrison’s fiction, cannot be “claimed”; she is “disremembered” and unaccounted for until the reader reaches the moral understanding of the traumatic memory she embodies.

Novelists (Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, Colson Whitehead, Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange), poets (Amanda Gorman, Brandy Nālani McDougall), filmmakers (Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele) and cultural thinkers (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Nicole Hannah Jones) are putting their lives on the line to keep bringing their stories to us, bearing the brunt of exclusionary national or state politics; reading literature that interrogates norms, as well as the old, new, and ongoing sources of oppression, involves taking a stance on the “knowing” side of the border. This represents the “knowing so deep”, as Morrison wrote in one of her most poignant essays on, and dedicated to, black women; Cheryl Wall referred to it as “worrying the line", alluding to the discontinuity that makes up African American women’s literary heritage. On the opposite side of the time border/fence, the future unfolds. If it takes a reckoning of the past to glimpse a future, as the “bridge” infrastructure of Yaa Gyasi’s "Homegoing" (2017) most aptly enacts, in the wake of "Song of Solomon" (1977) and "Beloved" (1987), then today’s African American literature and cinema can be a moral imagination roadmap toward a more knowing, understanding society.*** More than ever, stories matter, not only because they allow us to glimpse and comprehend the realities of others, but also because they make us better “moral inhabitants of the globe”.

*Morrison’s very first novel "The Bluest Eye", as well as some of her subsequent novels, have disappeared from many high school curriculums, following religion-grounded protests across the United States.

**Like all the beginnings of Morrison’s novels, the first sentence is a plunge into the story with no threshold, though a lot is to be learned from these two sentences. In "Paradise", she took on the history of an all-black town following the American Civil War; by reversing the racial hierarchies that prevailed at the time, she set out to “reconfigure blackness”, thereby deconstructing the artificial borders produced by racism. 

***In the realm of African American cinema, one may think of Dee Rees’s "Pariah" (2011) and "Mudbound" (2017), Spike Lee’s "BlackKklansman" (2018), Jordan Peele’s "Get Out" (2017) and "Us" (2019), Ava DuVernay’s miniseries "When They See Us" (2019) or Barry Jenkins’ "Underground Railroad" (2021), to name but a few recent films/series that explore different kinds and layers of borders.

Emmanuelle Andrès is an associate professor of American studies in the department of applied foreign languages at La Rochelle University in France. After working on her novels for many years, she has been recently involved with all intersecting aspects of her extensive writing, by way of the Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University.

Emmanuelle attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism” from September 19-23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.