solidarity, whereas Morrison presumes the failure of his dream of one
nation and draws from a tradition of nation-building in black prophecy
since before David Walker’s Appeal. But on what basis does she assert
and sustain black solidarity?
Partly by what she calls a recognizably black aesthetic rooted in
historic and vernacular cultural forms, which she tasks the novel with
remembering and preserving. Partly by memory of history: uprooting,
enslavement, and subjugation are cast as a traumatic legacy whose
narration and overcoming define a constitutive collective project. In
response, I would ask: Is Morrison’s aesthetic and therapeutic project
a symptom of political disappointment and a displacement of politics
into culture? A necessarily cultural politics in a world increasingly
post-national? In either case, isn’t it but a step from Hosea, whose
forgiving God says “I will call them my beloved who were not beloved,”
to the novel Beloved, whose epigraph is Paul quoting Hosea? So I also
would ask: in what ways does Morrison enact and in what ways does she
trouble -in what ways does she participate in and in what ways
distance us from- a redemptive story and promise?
Convention