Rethinking Paradise: Toni Morrison and Utopia at the Millennium

This essay discusses Paradise’s exploration of utopia, and it attempts to argue that just as the novel ambitiously remembers the history of more than a century of American race and gender relations, its rethinking of “paradise” as a concept is interwoven with a political interrogation of the entire history of a traditional utopian social, spatial, and literary form. Moreover, this critique occurs at a historical juncture when that form has reached its absolute limits. Specifically, Paradise’s most urgent utopian undertaking is to push—and to expose—the limits of the notion of utopia as a world apart, an island unto itself.