Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Herman Beavers

   Pages 1-22

3. North

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

      PDF

   2. Held in the Thrall: Morrison’s Southern Men and the Arrested Motion of Tight Space

      • Herman Beavers

      Pages 25-56

   3. From Zero to Nowhere: Tight Space and the Topophilia of Violence

      • Herman Beavers

      Pages 57-87

   4. The Housing of Hurt: The Optic of Tight Space in Jazz

      • Herman Beavers

      Pages 89-126

4. South

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

      PDF

   2. A Measure of Last Resort: Limerence and the Geometrical Shape of Community in Love

      • Herman Beavers

      Pages 129-161

   3. A Pox on All Your Houses: Susceptibility, Immunity, and the Dilemma of Allegory in A Mercy

      • Herman Beavers

      Pages 163-192

   4. The Most Absurd Garments Space-Time Can Imagine: Home’s Precarious Counter-Topography

      • Herman Beavers

      Pages 193-232

5. Back Matter

   Pages 233-253

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This book examines Toni Morrison’s fiction as a sustained effort to challenge the dominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman Beavers closely examines politics of scale and contentious politics in order to discern Morrison's larger intent of revealing the deep structure of power relations in black communities that will enable them to fashion counterhegemonic projects. The volume explores how Morrison stages her ruminations on the political imaginary in neighborhoods or small towns; rooms, houses or streets. Beavers argues that these spatial and domestic geographies are sites where the management of traumatic injury is integral to establishing a sense of place, proposing these “tight spaces” as sites where narratives are produced and contested; sites of inscription and erasure, utterance and silence.  

• geography in Toni Morrison's novels
• place-making in Sula
• racialized spaces in Toni Morrison's work
• trauma in Toni Morrison's novels
• hegemony and space in Song of Solomon
• "the personal is the political" and Toni Morrison's work
• Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia
• affect studies and Tar Baby
• black political agency in Toni Morrison's work
• gendered conflict over space in Song of Solomon
• black feminist standpoint epistemology
• intersection of race and gender conflict in Toni Morrison's work
• intersectionality in The Bluest Eye
• black women's negotiation of space and place
• Southern Men in Toni Morrison's novels
• alienation in Song of Solomon
• The Great Migration, identity, and Toni Morrison's Jazz
• Racism in the Jazz Age
• black womanhood and masculine anxiety
• politics of scale in Toni Morrison's novels

• Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

  Herman Beavers

Herman Beavers is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

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