Abstract

This chapter examines the writings of Toni Morrison about witnessing and dealing with death. It discusses the commentaries of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Francois Lyotard on Morrison's novels and suggests that her focus on origins upends the presumptive temporality of witnessing by revealing the entanglement of a future catastrophe with the desire for amnesia and severance from the past that so often appears to be a source of freedom. This chapter also contends that from The Bluest Eye through Tar Baby, Morrison questioned the processing of witnessing and most of her novels are filled with the necessity of remembering forgetting.

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