Introduction: Toni Morrison’s Artistic Cosmology and Enduring Legacy

Here is the year. It is 2020. It began without Toni Morrison. It has been unendingly difficult. Here are some of the reasons. Pandemic-caused death and resource shortages, unarmed Black people murdered at hands of the police, riots, and natural disasters occurred in the year. It has been a lot to handle. But we return to Toni Morrison. As we have in times good and bad. She reminds of us our complexity. She reminds us that we have generated complex worlds through fragmentation wrought by capture slavery Jim Crow de facto segregation violence health disparities natural disasters mass incarceration not having final resting places.

BREATHE . .

As we riff on the way Morrison deconstructed the language of the Dick and Jane primers in her debut novel The Bluest Eye, the time is ripe to revisit this first novel for all the ways it works to pull back the curtain on white supremacy, its pervasiveness, and its relentless efforts to devastate Black life. And in 2020, we are grappling with what it means to truly undermine these structures and reconstruct the world, which makes revisiting The Bluest Eye, published fifty years ago, necessary more now than ever. Set in the 1940s pre-Civil Rights era, the novel examines a time just before the cultural and legal shift toward desegregation and the insurgence of the Civil Rights Movement. Fifty years later and in the aftermath of these gains, issues of racial inequality and the devaluation of Black life remain ever present, even in moments of seeming progress. Cheryl Wall noted as much in a reflection on her experience of watching Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, being sworn in, only to be swiftly reminded that this one moment of progress would not constitute social transformation. Reflecting on the meaning of The Bluest Eye alongside Obama’s historic election, she writes, “I am an optimist, so I believe that the election of Barack Obama makes social transformation more possible . . . [However], the installation of the first African American president does not represent the fulfillment of the goals of freedom, justice, and equality. It is not yet jubilee” (Wall 2010, 800). These words are prescient given our current realities and the racial retrenchment that has taken place largely in response to very small steps in the advancement of racial equality. Wall’s reminder of the “not yet” of jubilee can be read alongside the “not yet” of freedom and the “not yet” of justice that we are witnessing Black subjects declare in the 2020 rebellion. Holding the “not yet” in mind, we return to The Bluest Eye and Morrison’s own meditation on the notion of racial progress, its discontents, and so much more . . .

We open with The Bluest Eye as a means to reflect on the inauguration of Morrison’s literary career and the world-making quality of her artistic praxis. Not only did the novel set the tone for a critical interrogation of America in the mid-twentieth century, but it also introduced us to a force who would re-shape the global literary landscape in profound ways. The Critical Forum section of this special issue is dedicated singularly to this novel. Scholars Herman Beavers, Faedra Carpenter, Farah Jasmine Griffin, E. Patrick Johnson, and Stephanie Li each offer invaluable reflections that enable a deeper contemplation of the novel’s significance both on and off the page. Each piece affirms Morrison’s sustained efforts to imagine otherwise both in her first novel and across all aspects of her work, no matter the genre.

On the original back cover of The Bluest Eye, one could behold the serious face and impressive afro of Morrison, looking at the camera, and thus the viewer, directly in the eye. No pretense, no fear, no apology. It was just her—presenting a book she sketched on napkins and legal pads, and wrote under the cover of morning dawns because she was a single mother working full-time as an editor for Random House. She wrote in the times she had. And she produced a book she...