The Essentialism/Anti-Essentialism Dialectic in Toni Morrison

This book explores Toni Morrison’s strategic negotiation of the essentialism/anti-essentialism dialectic regarding the representation of African American female subjectivity, the rewriting of African American history, and the re-appropriation of African American musical aesthetics in fiction. It also examines how Morrison’s dual-stance positioning demonstrates the conscious strategy of achieving the double goal of recovering African American and female voices as well as of critiquing hegemonic cultural logics about race and gender. The book argues that the motivations behind Morrison’s dialectic accommodation of the two stances in her fiction, namely The Bluest Eye, Sula, “Recitatif”, Jazz, and Paradise, are related to her strategic positioning that offers fruitful possibilities for mediating affirmations of difference and the necessity of racial, gender and cultural group politics.