Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing

Toni Morrisons readers and critics typically focus more on the what than the how of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrisons expressed narrative intention of providing spaces for the reader to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work. Mobleys approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrisons. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrisons cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment. Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work.