Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison

 This article was published in Essays and Studies XXVI, Jadavpur University, 2012

                                                                                                

At the very beginning of Woman Native Other Trinh T Minh Ha posits that a writer is “located at the intersection of subject and history”¹ whereby the positionality of each writer becomes intersected by race, class, gender and historical context. To these factors we might also add sexuality and language. Toni Morrison’s art, one of the richest,  most plural and diverse of contemporary women writers, makes brilliant use of context, without ever seeming to write from a programmed point of view. In an interview quoted in Terry Otten’s book the The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Morrison posits “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”² In an attempt to explain the overlapping categories of the regional and the universal in her work she tells Thomas LeClair in an interview in 1981,

 “It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good-and universal—because it is specifically about a particular world.”³