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Abstract
This paper examines Toni Morrison's politics of maternal violence and inter-civilizational contact in her novel Sula. Sula ends with a chapter entitled "1965"; I therefore take the entire story to be a rebuttal to the 1965 Moynihan Report and the normative sociology the Report represents: specifically the pathology the Report's attaches to matriarchal families and its calls for cultural and behavioral normalization. I conclude by claiming that Sula's figurative treatment of maternal violence and racial uplift-represented by fire and water-suggests a preference for a truly political relationship between black and white Americans over the increasingly moral, disciplinary, and bio-political relationship the Report epitomizes.
Keywords
Morrison, Toni, Agamben, Giorgio, Foucault, Michel, Bio-Power, Moynihan Report, Sula
Dedicated to Victor Wolfenstein (1940-2010), who gave us as many reasons to love him as to read his work.
Toni Morison's remarkable novel Sula creates an imaginary topos upon which life choices are contrasted for how they impact African Americans' sense of personal identity and the dynamics through which they interact with broader communities. Each of Sula's characters pursues a form of life1 for themself: a shell-shocked Shadrack has no choice but to work upon himself, finding his place in the world in the most rudimentary sense is a challenge for him; Nel pursues the good life in the household, conducting herself according to terms set by white society and the black middle class's notion of racial uplift; Sula is the rebel who leaves her small town and returns a suspicious cosmopolitan. Specifically, each character represents a lifestyle option for black Americans at the end of Jim Crow, facing the challenges of increased interracial contact. As the name Shadrack suggests, these characters can be read as the three 'boys' of Nebuchedenezzar's furnace: figuratively choosing between forms of baptism (by water or by fire) and idols to worship (the self, the white world, negritude, etc).
Sula's characters move from the recent Jim Crow past into the post-civil rights present, and Morrison mines that past for survival strategies facilitating adaptation to new circumstances. As Morrison characterizes it, the milieu in which black Americans make life choices is a hostile racial climate in transition. Of the three characters, Nel is treated with the greatest depth; her life choices are contrasted with the...