Cultivating America: Colonial History in the Morrisonian Wilderness

This essay takes up Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy to explore the connection between the Euro-American trope of wilderness and colonial practices of interpretation. By deploying the multilayered trope of wilderness, A Mercy highlights the way colonial epistemology is deeply embedded in conventional Euro-American ways of reading—whether the text be written document, land, or human body—that rely on notions of discrete selfhood, linear history, abstract logic, and the elimination of ambiguity. Through this same trope, the novel ultimately unsettles the colonized territory of the reading process, offering a mode of reading that ruptures colonial interpretation.