Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison...

If a text like Beloved helps to interiorize the life of the “anonymous people called slaves”⁵² through a process that is very “personal,”⁵³ and  if it helps to engage with history on an epic level, Song of Solomon, illuminates certain contexts of black cultural activism in the 1960’s. As Madhu Dubey tells us in Black Women Novelists and the Black  National Aesthetic, Black Nationalism and the Black Aesthetic movement  stressed the unified, historically undetermined black male agent who was perfectly free and autonomous.⁵⁴ In the age of militant black Nationalism, Black aestheticians preferred poetry and drama as suitable literary modes through which the black artist could communicate his message to a black community that was deemed or posited as unified.⁵⁵

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon emerges as a critique of such unilateral positions. Madhu Dubey posits that black women writers of this period emerge as highly interrogative of both the seamless view of history that the black aestheticians and nationalists were positing, and also of the privileging of the black male subject.⁵⁶