Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.
Contents Acknowledgments Forty Years and More in The Clearing: Morrison Chronology, 1970-2012 Introduction: Gather at the Clearing, by Carmen Gillespie In the Beginning: Two Reviews, John Leonard's New York Times 1970 Review of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's New York Times "Letter to the Editor" in Response to Sara Blackburn's 1973 Review of Sula In Search of the Clearing, by Elizabeth Beaulieu Trouble in Paradise: Representing Bliss in Non-Orgiastic Language, by Katie G. Cannon "Margaret's Lullaby" (from Margaret Garner), by Richard Danielpour "Creatively serving-the process": An Interview with Playwright Lydia Diamond, Author of the Play The Bluest Eye American Romance, the Moral Imagination and Toni Morrison: A Theory of Literary Aesthetics, by Jan Furman Meditations on Love, by Joanne V. Gabbin And Everyone Will Answer, by Nikki Giovanni Morrison as Subject: Photographs, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Wrestling Till Dawn: On Becoming an Intellectual In the Age of Morrison by Farah Jasmine Griffin Playing in the Wild: Toni Morrison's Canon and the Wild Zone, by Missy Dehn Kubitschek "Looking Shakespeare in the Face": An Interview with Toni Morrison's Howard University Friends, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn Melancholy and the Unyielding Earth in The Bluest Eye, by Kathleen Kelly Marks Co(n)ven(t): A Performance Study of Toni Morrison's Paradise, by Dustyn Martincich Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?: Food, Race, and [En]countering the Modern in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, by Susan Neal Mayberry Testimony and Transformation: An Exploration of the Intersections of the Arts of Toni Morrison and the Potential Therapeutic Uses of Her Narratives, by Lakeisha Meyer Belief and Performance: Morrison and Me, by Koritha Mitchell Praise Song for Toni Morrison, by Mendi and Keith Obadike Morrison and Obama An interview with Barack H. Obama Body Difference in Toni Morrison's Fiction, by Linden Peach Toni Morrison, Theodore Gericault, and Incendiary Art, by Nancy J. Peterson Morrison as Muse: The Poetic Process by Christine Jessica Margaret Reilly Haiku (for Toni Morrison), by Sonia Sanchez The Making of a Novelist (Epistolary), by A . J. Verdelle Beloved Bodies, by L. Martina Young Bibliography Works by Toni Morrison (Editions Cited in This Volume) Other Sources (Cited in This Volume) Secondary Sources
