Thoughts On Clash Revelations Of Hybridity

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, African American literature has flourished. The startling amplitude of such writing appearing suggests that we are really witnessing something of a spiritual renaissance in American letters.As one of the most serious, important, and talented American authors now working, "Toni Morrison is both a great novelist and the closest thing the country has to a national writer." She is part of a long and American literary tradition that finds its full and complicated bloom in her art. The fact that she speaks "as a woman and a black only enhances her ability to speak as an American." The rise of Toni Morrison to national and international recognition has been motivated not only by the magnificent body of her works, but also by a rethinking of the relationship between "the west and the rest", between Anlgo-American and African American culture, of the relevance of race to all areas of culture and aesthetics, society and politics. Morrison has become an increasingly important voice of African Americans and of the "common voice" of human beings. More than seventy dictionaries and encyclopedias on American, world, and African American history and literature carry entries on Toni Morrison. They range from brief biographical accounts to aubstantive summaries of her life and works.Toni Morrison describes her works as the creation of "a map of...a critical geography...intended to open...space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration...without the mandate for conquest". Her writing objective is to "avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served". Her concern is to subvert a polite literary criticism that refuses to see the richness and complexities in American literature and to activate another that will not be afraid to face "the disrupting darkness" of the Africanist presence in its midst. Morrison is not the first black writer to advance the theory of interconnections between the African presence in America and the language and literature of white American writers. Many of the most notable black writers, including Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, made great efforts in this field, yet she is the first to gain substantial critical support on the issue.Although Toni Morrison explicitly addresses her works mainly to an African American readership, her works are read throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, and form a part of a global conversation about the nature of contemporary community. Her works are also a creative discourse of multiple cultures in the postcolonial era. Her novels are hybrid, multivoiced, multilayered, writerly and speakerly, both popular and literary highbrow. In her...