Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color

Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison's work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate's novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature.

Morrison's ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child.

By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

Author: Anissa Janine Wardi
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 06/12/2021
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.69lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.48d
ISBN: 9781496834171


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/05/2021
Choice 06/01/2022

About the Author
Anissa Janine Wardi is professor of English and African American literature at Chatham University. She is author of Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective and Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature, and her work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, ISLE, and MELUS