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During a 1998 Oprah Winfrey Show "Book Club" discussion of Paradise, Toni Morrison described her new novel as a "rethinking that the whole idea of all paradises in literature and history . . . and in our minds and in all the holy books are special places that are fruitful, bountiful, safe, gorgeous, and defined by those who can't get in" ("Book Club"; emphasis added). Morrison's remarks reflect her novel's titular concern with the question of utopia as well as how the text confronts a paradox intrinsic to so many attempts to imagine a "perfect" world. Utopias historically have been predicated upon notions of absolute spatial and social closure, and this self-definition by way of radical exclusion constitutes an act of social, political, and even ontological violence through which ideas of "paradise" negate themselves at the very moment of conception. Many scholars have used the word "utopia" when discussing one of the novel's two alternative communities. Curiously, however, even though one might say that Morrison's Paradise is fundamentally a book "about" utopia, no extensive analysis yet in print focuses exclusively on the text as a work of utopian literature,1 let alone on Morrison's self-professed "rethinking" of the genre and its conventions. In fact, years after the novel's publication, Holly Flint argued that critics seem strangely "at a loss when it comes to" what she views as Paradise's "overarching question": that is, "how does this novel represent paradise?" (607).
This question of representation addresses the way in which conventional notions of utopias as manifest literary "blueprints" of would-be ideal societies can influence critics' approaches to a text like Paradise. However, Morrison's engagement with the promise and problems of utopia is in fact much richer. Tom Moylan briefly hints at this when he observes that Morrison's notoriously elusive text, which he concedes functions outside "the usual parameters of the literary utopia," is concerned "not with a given utopian object, but with the complexities of utopia itself" ("Introduction" 1). In the spirit of Moylan's comments, this essay discusses Paradise's exploration of utopia, arguing that, even as the novel ambitiously remembers the history of American race and gender relations, it interweaves its rethinking of "paradise" as a concept with a political interrogation of the entire history of a traditional...