The texture of transformation: Theology, history, and politics in the novels of Toni Morrison.
Item
-
Title
-
The texture of transformation: Theology, history, and politics in the novels of Toni Morrison.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9417474
-
identifier
-
9417474
-
Creator
-
Hunt, Patricia Anne.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Jane Connor Marcus
-
Date
-
1994
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American
-
Abstract
-
Although Toni Morrison's biblical allusions are often noted in studies of her work, most critics have viewed her use of scripture as either peripheral or as subversive of Christianity, in keeping with a more general subversion of Western culture in her novels. In contrast, I argue that Morrison's subversiveness is realized through the creation, in her fiction, of an African American Christian liberation theology. The varieties of modes of theology that emphasize liberation and freedom in terms of material, this-worldly existence capture the protean, conflicted, unstable nature of Toni Morrison's texts. Instead of seeing Christianity as a belief system imposed on enslaved Africans from outside, and separate from African-based folklore and cosmologies, Morrison's political texts illustrate the intersection of all these systems, and the cultural specificity of African American Christianity to the community which has given rise to it. The Christianity of black Americans is an Africanized form that is foundational of African American culture. Morrison lays claim to the Bible and to African American Christianity in a culturally-generated discourse different from dualistic, competing Eurocentric discourses. By comprehending the exclusion of African and African American cultural experience from the hegemonically-constructed history of the United States, Morrison reorients the late twentieth-century reader to a new vision which foregrounds not only African American participation in, but constitution of, that history.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
