Is Toni Morrison's writing as politically progressive as is widely assumed? In this eye-opening study, critic William Jefferson argues that it is not. Analyzing Morrison's major texts from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Jefferson argues that Morrison's writing has advanced problematic conceptions of racial essentialism, sexuality, and agency that would not be identified as in any way progressive if issued from the pen of a white writer. More than merely showing readers underappreciated aspects of African-American history, Morrison's fiction has actively intervened in the politics of her era--and in ways politically reactionary and disturbing. Stepping back from Morrison's fiction, Jefferson asks why scholars have not recognized these political aspects of Morrison's writing. What he finds is a purportedly left-wing academy focused predominantly on recognizing the indisputably black aspects of Morrison's work. This "politics of recognition," unfortunately, also naturalizes Morrison's representations in the same manner liberal humanist criticism naturalized the representations of the pre-1970 literary canon.

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. FREE!

In an era of heightened concern about injustice in relations of identity and difference, political theorists often prescribe equal recognition as a remedy for the ills of subordination. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, they envision a system of reciprocal knowledge and esteem, in which the affirming glance of others lets everyone be who they really are. This book challenges the equation of recognition with justice. Patchen Markell mines neglected strands of the concept's genealogy and reconstructs an unorthodox interpretation of Hegel, who, in the unexpected company of Sophocles, Aristotle, Arendt, and others, reveals why recognition's promised satisfactions are bound to disappoint, and even to stifle. Written with exceptional clarity, the book develops an alternative account of the nature and sources of identity-based injustice in which the pursuit of recognition is part of the problem rather than the solution. And it articulates an alternative conception of justice rooted not in the recognition of identity of the other but in the acknowledgment of our own finitude in the face of a future thick with surprise. Moving deftly among contemporary political philosophers (including Taylor and Kymlicka), the close interpretation of ancient and modern texts (Hegel's Phenomenology, Aristotle's Poetics, and more), and the exploration of rich case studies drawn from literature (Antigone), history (Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia), and modern politics (official multiculturalism), Bound by Recognition is at once a sustained treatment of the problem of recognition and a sequence of virtuoso studies.

Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison’s focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.”

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy, has been received with much acclaim by both the critical and lay reading public. Hailed as her best novel after the award-winning Beloved, most critics to date have concentrated on its setting in the late seventeenth century, a time in which, according to the author herself, slavery was “pre-racial,” a time before the “Terrible Transformation” irrevocably linked slavery to skin-color or “race.” Though a slender, easy to read novel, A Mercy is in fact a richly-layered text, full of multiple meanings and possibilities, a work of art that has only just begun to be “mined” for its critical import. The present volume is the first to deal with these possibilities, presenting a variety of critical approaches that include narrative theory, the eco-critical, the geographical, the allegorical, the Miltonian, the feminist, the metaphorical, and the Lacanian. As such, not only is it conceived to enrich the work of Morrison scholars and students, but also to illuminate the use of critical theory in elucidating a complex literary text. A Mercy clamors for close reading and thoughtful interrogation and promises to reward the perceptive reader.

With increased mobility and transnational interaction worldwide, internationalism in contemporary visual art is no longer exclusively a western issue. Contemporary visual art includes works by expatriate artists who have settled in the west, as well as artists outside the west reflecting on everyday events in a globalized world. Peripheral Insider examines the conditions of expatriate artists from various angles: the historical and colonial roots of the issue, positions among theorists dealing with expatriate artists in the west, the role of established art institutions, and examples of recent developments in the field. Peripheral Insider argues that expatriate art or internationalism in visual art is a phenomenon with a specific history, closely related to colonial and post-colonial experiences. The contributors elucidate the book's main theme on various theoretical levels and set forth their analyses of a number of issues relevant to new interpretations of "the post-colonial agenda."

2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist 2020 NAACP Image Award Nominee - Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction) Best-of Lists: Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · 25 Can't-Miss Books of 2019 (The Undefeated) Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love—finding beauty and possibility in life—and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition. Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools. With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes, Breathe offers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience.

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition is a study in critical postmodern social theory. By engaging a dialogue with Heidegger, Kristeva, and Irigaray, it offers unique insights into Heidegger's heroic embrace of the manly ethos of National Socialism. Against certain poststructuralist feminist tendencies to throw the baby of intentionality out with the bath water of voluntarism, Huntington interweaves elements of Kristevan and Heideggerian thought in order to reconstruct a linguistically embedded, existentially and affectively rich, dialectical model of willed self-regulation. Pressing Heideggerian ontology into the service of a viable social theory, she argues that this ontology accounts for the utopian impulse in Irigaray's search for a critical poetic reenchantment of the lifeworld and supplies Irigaray with the philosophical foundation for a model of ethical recognition based upon asymmetrical reciprocity.