Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing [Paperback]

Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. InToni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of providing “spaces for the reader” to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.

Mobley’s approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrison’s. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment.

Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work."[P]erceptive.... Mobley is a capable interpreter of Morrison’s oeuvre.... [L]iterature scholars will appreciate the insights into Morrison’s fiction."—Publishers Weekly
 “In her brilliant study, Marilyn Sanders Mobley creates a voluminous space for readers to explore how Toni Morrison’s work invites us to make meaning for ourselves through her writing. While scholars of Morrison’s oeuvre will no doubt benefit from this intelligent and wide-ranging encounter, Mobley’s greatest achievement, perhaps, is in making anyone feel welcome who comes to Morrison in search of a deeper understanding of how to survive in the worlds we inhabit, from home to society, in our skins and inside the memories we carry. It’s a powerful and learned meditation, and one that deserves l3a