From the Village to the World : Toni Morrison’s Critical Geography

This essay, the English language introduction to Toni Morrison – Au-delà du visible ordinaire/ ToniMorrison–Beyond the Ordinary Visible places the volume within the larger context of Morrison Studies, and given the volume’s focus on A Mercy draws renewed attention to the author’s method (literary archaeology), practice (“indisputably black”), and her design (multiple levels of interiority/referentiality). Morrison’s “critical geography” is her way of mapping specific historical sites and moments revealing painful truths about a nation and a world, hell bent on power and expansion without moral conscience. By going more deeply into the analogy, however, we can read Morrison’s work as a form of place making, an intentional remapping of history, with its own linguistic recoding. Morrison’s historical map is syncretic, deliberate, a composite of discarded fragments, pieces left behind, sounds and utterances which are the consequence of contact among Africans, indigenous peoples, and Europeans. A Mercy highlights these factors precisely as it shows pre-colonial America in the act of being lived.