Toni Morrison and political theory

Before she died on 5 August 2019, the black American writer, Toni Morrison, managed to become one of the most influential writers of the past century. Her eleven novels – from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015) – interrogated the twin pillars of white supremacy and the unrelenting quest for black dignity and subjectivity in the USA. Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, on 18 February 1931 and studied English and Classics at Howard University before receiving an MA at Cornell University, where she wrote her thesis on the theme of suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Morrison then took up a position as commissioning editor at Random House, with the aim of helping writers of color like Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayl Jones have a platform for their creative voices. When Morrison herself took up writing, which she tried to do before and after grueling hours at work while also managing the strenuous work of a single mother, what emerged was her first novel, The Bluest Eye. This was a story of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who desperately desires blue eyes as a way to register as white and escape the anti-black racism that structures American life. The themes that The Bluest Eye explored with incredible rigor and clear prose cut right into the page – alienation, melancholy, exploitation, desire, memory, hope, dreams, family, gender, masculinity, and, most consistently, love. They would be continued throughout her work. Nowhere was this clearer than in her Nobel Prizewinning novel, Beloved (1987). The book told the story of a black woman, Sethe, and the post-Reconstruction community in which she finds herself, grappling with the return of her child – as a ghost, named Beloved – whom she had killed in an effort to protect her from the horrors of enslavement.