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Toni Morrison

Forty Years in The Clearing

Edited by Carmen Gillespie

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison’s work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison’s imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’s cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.

Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison’s canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison’s friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama.

What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison’s work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison’s metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as “a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.” Morrison’s Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison’s intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison’s vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 368 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-61148-491-5 • Hardback • November 2012 • $108.00 • (£83.00)

978-1-61148-634-6 • Paperback • October 2014 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-61148-492-2 • eBook • November 2012 • $58.00 • (£45.00)

Series: The Griot Project Book Series

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / African American, Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / Feminist, Literary Criticism / Women Authors

Toni Morrison

Forty Years in The Clearing

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison’s work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison’s imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’s cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.

Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison’s canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison’s friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama.

What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison’s work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison’s metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as “a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.” Morrison’s Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison’s intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison’s vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 368 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-61148-491-5 • Hardback • November 2012 • $108.00 • (£83.00)

978-1-61148-634-6 • Paperback • October 2014 • $60.99 • (£47.00)

978-1-61148-492-2 • eBook • November 2012 • $58.00 • (£45.00)

Series: The Griot Project Book Series

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / African American, Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / Feminist, Literary Criticism / Women Authors

Author

Carmen Gillespie is professor of English and creative writing at Bucknell University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Forty Years and More in The Clearing: Morrison Chronology, 1970–2012
Introduction: Gather at the Clearing, by Carmen Gillespie
In the Beginning: Two Reviews, John Leonard’s New York Times 1970 Review of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s New York Times “Letter to the Editor” in Response to Sara Blackburn’s 1973 Review of Sula
In Search of the Clearing, by Elizabeth Beaulieu
Trouble in Paradise: Representing Bliss in Non-Orgiastic Language, by Katie G. Cannon
“Margaret’s Lullaby” (from Margaret Garner), by Richard Danielpour
“Creatively serving—the process”: An Interview with Playwright Lydia Diamond, Author of the Play The Bluest Eye
American Romance, the Moral Imagination and Toni Morrison: A Theory of Literary Aesthetics, by Jan Furman
Meditations on Love, by Joanne V. Gabbin
And Everyone Will Answer, by Nikki Giovanni
Morrison as Subject: Photographs, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Wrestling Till Dawn: On Becoming an Intellectual In the Age of Morrison by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Playing in the Wild: Toni Morrison’s Canon and the Wild Zone, by Missy Dehn Kubitschek
“Looking Shakespeare in the Face”: An Interview with Toni Morrison’s Howard University Friends, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn
Melancholy and the Unyielding Earth in The Bluest Eye, by Kathleen Kelly Marks
Co(n)ven(t): A Performance Study of Toni Morrison’s Paradise,by Dustyn Martincich
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?: Food, Race, and [En]countering the Modern in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,by Susan Neal Mayberry
Testimony and Transformation: An Exploration of the Intersections of the Arts of Toni Morrison and the Potential Therapeutic Uses of Her Narratives, by Lakeisha Meyer
Belief and Performance: Morrison and Me, by Koritha Mitchell
Praise Song for Toni Morrison, by Mendi and Keith Obadike
Morrison and Obama An interview with Barack H. Obama
Body Difference in Toni Morrison’s Fiction, by Linden Peach
Toni Morrison, Théodore Géricault, and Incendiary Art, by Nancy J. Peterson
Morrison as Muse: The Poetic Process by Christine Jessica Margaret Reilly
Haiku (for Toni Morrison), by Sonia Sanchez
The Making of a Novelist (Epistolary), by A . J. Verdelle
Beloved Bodies, by L. Martina Young
Bibliography
Works by Toni Morrison (Editions Cited in This Volume)
Other Sources (Cited in This Volume)
Secondary Sources

Reviews

Gillespie has collected an impressively varied array of genres for this volume in the "Griot Project Book Series," which looks at the aesthetics, art, history, and culture of African America and the African diaspora. More than a scholarly exploration, the collection celebrates Morrison and her wide influence on other practitioners. There are chapters on Morrison's work in relation to other arts— music, painting, dance—with links to audio tracks from Richard Danielpour's opera Margaret Garner, based on Beloved, and to the poet-musicians Mendi and Keith Obadike's lovely "Praise Song for Toni Morrison," and also poems by Sonia Sanchez and a memoir by Nikki Giovanni. Gillespie includes scholarly pieces by Jan Furman about the relationship between moral knowledge and aesthetics in Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and by Susan Mayberry, who discusses modernism, race, and food in Tar Baby--to cite just two examples of this collection's riches. A chronology and bibliography of Morrison's work are included. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
— Choice Reviews

Gillespie constructs a rich critical narrative of Morrison's works.
— The Journal of African American History

Toni Morrison

Forty Years in The Clearing

Edited by Carmen Gillespie

Toni Morrison

Forty Years in The Clearing

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