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This book presents background information on the beliefs, customs, traditions and cosmologies of several of Africa's foremost peoples, relates these findings to each of Morrison's seven novels by highlighting the connections between the African root and the African-American product, and elucidates how this connection helps to understand and to.

Traces Morrison’s theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews. Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison’s novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O’Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women’s experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison’s view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women’s fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O’Reilly, is Morrison’s maternal theory—a politics of the heart. “As an advocate of ‘a politics of the heart,’ O’Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values … Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O’Reilly’s methodical research on Morrison’s works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison’s works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison’s rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition.” — African American Review “O’Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences.” — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering “Andrea O’Reilly examines Morrison’s complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison.” — South Atlantic Review “…it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author … anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O’Reilly’s exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison’s works result in a highly useful scholarly read.” — Literary Mama “By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison’s literary world, O’Reilly conveys Morrison’s vision of motherhood as an act of resistance.” — American Literature “Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison’s interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O’Reilly for illuminating Morrison’s ‘maternal standpoint’ and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature.” — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction “In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O’Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences.” — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of Minnesota Andrea O’Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University and President of the Association for Research on Mothering. She is the author and editor of several books on mothering, including (with Sharon Abbey) Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation and Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons.

Sam Durrant’s powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud’s opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.

Toni Morrison (1931–2019)2 Introduction There is a problem of gaze at the heart of academic global health. Because without naming this problem, we cannot have holistic discussions on imbalances in the authorship of academic global health publications. Recent bibliometric analyses3–6 (some of which have been published in BMJ Global Health7–9) confirm patterns that are largely explained by entrenched power asymmetries in global health partnerships—between researchers in high-income countries (often the source of funds and agenda) and those in middle-income and especially low-income countries (where the research is often conducted). The audience for whom the paper was written would likely be other anthropologists who perform similar service in other countries working as foreigners—a role that may not exist if all such response teams were led by local experts—that is, if every country had the capacity (especially, the funds) to respond to their own outbreaks. [...]a paper would be published where our ‘ideal’ paper is published: in local journals, many of which may not be indexed in global databases or published in English,19 but contain publications addressing research questions and policy issues that would exist, irrespective of the presence and influence of foreign experts, foreign funds, foreign donors, foreign helpers or foreign

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye portrays, among other both white and black lives in a less significant mark, the life of a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove whose desperate longing for owning the bluest eyes so as to free herself from the shame and disgrace of her birthed identity has inspired the author to name the novel so. Morrison inserted into the protagonist her (Morrison’s) depraved experience of injustice, inequality, racial discrimination, social stigmatization and, above all, inborn physical outlook, wielded upon the black communities in America during her (Morrison’s) time. While brooding over the question why a black girl would hanker after the bluest eyes, I find the hints, specified descriptions and clarified answers provided by Morrison in the novel logically matched with “Symbolic Capital”, the last of the four capitals delineated by the French philosopher and public intellectual Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). Accordingly, this article seeks to appraise Pecola’s yearning for the bluest eyes in    Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye through Bourdieu’s theory of “Symbolic Capital”.

Gratitude, often relegated to the domain of affective sentiment, warrants deeper epistemological and ontological inquiry, particularly when examined through the prisms of life, culture, language, and literature. In Shakespeare's King Lear, the tragic unraveling of familial bonds pivots on the failure of gratitude, revealing its centrality to ethical subjectivity. Literary texts frequently transform gratitude from a private emotion to a collective articulation of memory, trauma, and hope. [...]gratitude, in its deepest inflection, is not merely a social nicety but an epistemic posture.

Toni Morrison's readers and critics typically focus more on the \"what\" than the \"how\" of her writing.In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing , Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison's expressed narrative intention of providing \"spaces for the reader\" to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.

     At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only \"ghost story\" among Toni Morrison's nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author's fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses specters to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores.      Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist's canon-from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and Sula, to their flowering in the trilogy that comprises Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy.      An important contribution to the understanding of one of America's premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate's powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories. Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi.