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  • Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison
  • Anne Mihan (bio)
Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Rebecca Hope Ferguson. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007. 321 pages. $51.95 paper.

With Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Rebecca Hope Ferguson has produced a fresh discussion of Morrison's novels published before 2005. Ferguson sets out to explore "Morrison's concern with the multiplicity of African-American identities and experience," her "awareness of the multiple affiliations and points of difference within black communities as they relate to a range of issues (class, gender, generational aspirations, geographical locations), and her marked interest in historical periods of transition" (11).

Taking Morrison's interest in the African American community's reactions to historical transitions as a reference point, Ferguson discusses each novel under a specific focus. Her reading of The Bluest Eye (1970) connects psychoanalytical object relation theory with critical race theory, centering on the "interplay between the black protagonists' encounters with the world and the perceptions which they have internalised from that world" (30). Claudia's successful distancing of herself and her black body from white ideals of physical beauty is contrasted with Pecola's tragic inability to do so, an inability derived from lack of love and marginalization within the black community as well as larger US society.

In her discussion of Sula (1974), Ferguson examines "spatial and visual [End Page 193] aspects of the novel," with its narrative exploring the community of the Bottom, Eva and Sula's relationship, Shadrack's and Sula's different strategies of coping with trauma and displacement, and Sula's and Nel's "varying perceptions of the spaces they inhabit . . . along with their distinctive responses to the acts of seeing, witnessing, watching and being watched" (55, 56). The self is shown to develop in relation to others, a notion that also forms the basis of Ferguson's reading of Song of Solomon (1977). Here she skillfully illustrates Morrison's juxtaposition of elements of the quest narrative with experiences of interaction and encounter and of responsibility for oneself and others as modes of unifying the fragmented self. Ferguson views the use of the call-and-response motif as indicative of Morrison's plea for an interactive relationship between individual and community and of her emphasis on dialogic exchange as prerequisite for social change.

Ferguson's chapter on Tar Baby (1981) investigates how Morrison's employment of tar as a symbol for both identity-bestowing connectedness with black traditions and an unwillingness to confront change creatively "[brings] together the ancient and the modern, the coherent and the chaotic, the 'natural' and the 'unnatural,' in a troubled relationship" (115). Ferguson underlines the complexity of this novel, concluding, "If Son is enabled to retreat (or be again 'reborn') into the legendary past . . . still it remains an open question whether this is a liberation or whether that past, viewed as a prospect, is not mythical in the pejorative sense of the word" (127).

Ferguson's discussion of Beloved (1987) emphasizes the way Morrison's exploration of the mother/child relationship, trauma, and repression "represents slavery's disruption of the potential for a range of communal and intersubjective bonds" (137). While she traces the author's reconstruction of history in a postmodern narrative that also employs African narrative traditions, Ferguson stresses Morrison's perception that "[h]owever compelling the claims of the past may be . . . it can never be fully negotiated, and we can only develop our own understanding of it" (159).

Morrison's engagement of her readers in a dialogue also presents a cornerstone of Ferguson's reading of Jazz (1992), where "the power to transform is being passed to the hands of another—most importantly, to the reader who literally holds the text" (189). Ferguson explores the author's "rewriting of what it might mean to be a 'new Negro'" during the "Great Migration" (164), concluding that "self-division and radical uncertainty define Morrison's representation" (178).

This tension between the need for African Americans to be new in the face of changed situations and their longing for stability determines Ferguson's focus...

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