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6 “Healing” World Literature Toni Morrison’s Conflicts of Interest In LA MIGRATION DES COEURS, the récits of fishermen and nannies provide a popular commentary on the novel’s melodrama while connecting up formally with Wuthering Heights, prominently marked by Nelly Dean’s Yorkshire vernacular. Yet as the Caribbean vernacular reveals itself to be caught up in the world-literary formation of the gothic by inflecting a transatlantic discursive contest over racial taxonomy, the novel points to ways the vernacular exceeds its role as a mark of the local. Its imbrication in global generic and racial formations recall the ways Du Bois and Hurston, Carpentier and Walcott, constitute the vernacular as a site of cosmopolitan accumulation. By treating it primarily as an authenticating local marker, cultural nationalist ideologies of the vernacular—from negrismo to Black Power—often serve these authors as a hostile interlocutor threatening their freedom to trace the diaspora’s discursive relations scattered across space and time, worldly relations congealed within and indexed by the vernacular. Similarly, Maryse Condé’s 1993 anti-manifesto “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer” rejects a prescriptive series of “commands decreed” for Francophone Caribbean writing, from Négritude to Creolité.1 Condé positions herself as a writer who introduces chaos to the recognizable order of French Antillean literature. By avoiding sacred tropes of messianic masculinity, contesting mythical geographies of Africa and the native land, and foregrounding women’s sexuality and psychology, she claims to strike a note for artistic freedom against restrictive identitarian protocols. Toni Morrison, in her own 1983 ars poetica, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” by contrast , acknowledges her conformity to “the major characteristics of Black art.”2 These textual markers of blackness include an “oral quality ” (343); “the affective and participatory relationship between the 120 “Healing” World Literature artist or the speaker and the audience” (341); “the real presence of a chorus [, m]eaning the community or the reader at large, commenting on the action as it goes ahead” (341); and “the presence of an ancestor” (343). And she concludes by noting that “the work must be political” (344). Whereas Condé expresses exasperation at “the tedious enumeration of the elements of popular culture which . . . leaves very little freedom for creativity,” Morrison advocates for the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement.3 She expresses an urgent social need to infuse the characteristics of popular black art into the novel due to the loss of “exclusive rights” to black music, on the one hand (“Other people sing it and play it; it is the mode of contemporary music everywhere” [340]), and to the demise of oral storytelling, on the other (“We don’t live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don’t sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago” [340]). The African American novel, for Morrison, is a “healing” and “didactic” substitute for the waning functions of oral and performative traditions (340). By these terms, as well as those of the market and the Nobel Prize committee, Morrison, with her well-distributed dreadlocked image, has emerged on the world-literary stage as an avatar of the very ancestor she theorized: “benevolent, instructive, and protective . . . provid[ing] a certain kind of wisdom” (343). As a world-literary figure, then, Morrison ostensibly embodies the communitarian cohesiveness that “Rootedness” claims for black art, working on the terrain of what Farah Jasmine Griffin refers to as “textual healing.”4 And yet while Morrison’s image and texts circulate far and wide as a symbol of what La Vinia Delois Jennings, building off Morrison’s essay, calls that “elusive but identifiable Blackness,” her novels expansively imagine their kin and kind.5 While their plots frequently dramatize the quest for a restorative sense of communal rootedness, her formal engagements frequently work counter to the notion of linear, singular descent implicit in the metaphor of rootedness. Morrison’s work traverses the vernacular with highly trafficked lines of descent indexing multiple histories and geographies. These formal engagements turn the vernacular toward a different sort of healing than organic rootedness in the local, instead situating African American culture in long-lived itineraries of narrative circulation, translation, and exchange. In Song of Solomon (1977) and Paradise (1998), local identitarian textual markers get pulled into geographies of transmission by which the specter of far-flung times and places complicate and disrupt contemporary politics of the vernacular and its modalities of healing. As [18.222.120.133...

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