Toni Morrison's Black Liberal Humanism (and other excerpts)

By William A. Jefferson

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William A. Jefferson
• Release date: Jun 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501468711

Book preview

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