Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Mobility(?) in Toni Morrison's Novels."

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Adam Hotek
University of Pennsylvania
ahotek@english.upenn.edu

My paper examines how Toni Morrison codes the idea of African-American travel in her novels. This paper pays special attention to Morrison's latest novel Paradise. My analysis is contextualized by Hortense Spiller's commentary about what constitutes the ur-moment in the history of African-American travel -- defined, in her essay "Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," as the middle passage. In this essay Spillers argues that the slave ship constituted a site where black gendered identity was defined in non-conventional ways: African men and women catagorically lumped together as "cargo." Her contention is that this moment in African-American history was not an ephemeral one. Instead it shaped the gender of African-American culture for centuries to come. I use this premise as a starting point to look at how Morrisons novels affirm and trouble Spiller's argument. These novels are of course not absolutely governed by the middle passage; however I argue that her novels are profoundly underscored by a relationship between travel and gendered identity in ways that draw comparisons to Spiller's arguments. In Morrison's work travel has a distinctively different valence for men and women. In this paper, through particular readings of Morrison's texts I explore how race contextualizes this difference and theorize about how she arrives at a poetics that in distinctive ways links the categories of race,gender and travel.

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Adam Hotek
Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
ahotek@english.upenn.edu

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