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PLEASE, GROUPS SHARE YOUR PARTS TO THE E-BOARD

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Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

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• Harlem Renaissance period lasted from 1910 and 1930

• It is a period of cultural and artistic rise in African-americans

•Movement of Civil Rights in 1950s and 1960s made people bring new themes of social justice and political activism to the forefront of the literary scene.

•1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of of black feminist writers like Alice Walker, Toni Horrison

• In the late 20th and early 21st centuries,African-american writers explore range of genres and themes.

• Experiences and struggles of black individuals in a changing society

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The work of African American writers in the second half of the 20th century and the evaluation of major themes. 

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The work of African American writers in the second half of the 20th century and the evaluation of major themes. 

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This passage explores key themes in African American literature during the second half of the 20th century. First theme is related to the black experience. Major theme was intersection of race and gender. Tony Morrison and Alice Walker explored experience of black women in their writings. Another theme during this period was legacy of slavery and its influence on American communities. This was explored in works such as Toni Morrison's "Beloved". This work includes magical realism and science fiction, which shows emotional and psychological impact of slavery to both individuals and families. And the last one is civil rights movement. Writers such as James Baldwin used their work to explore its political and social implications.

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The Harlem Renaissance (1910-1930) was a cultural movement in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s and 1930s. It was a time when African American art, music, and literature became very important. People felt proud of their culture and wanted to change negative ideas about African Americans. This movement started because many African Americans moved from the South to the North for better jobs and opportunities. Harlem became a center for creativity, bringing together artists, writers, and musicians. The Harlem Renaissance had a big influence on African American culture and is still remembered today as an important part of history.

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"Beloved" the novel by Tony Morrison.

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Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When Wofford was about 15 years old, a group of White people lynched two African-American businessmen who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him." Soon after the lynching, George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated Whites so much he would not let them in the house.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness".

Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs. She read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

Morrison became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni. Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. Initially a student in the drama program at Howard, she studied theatre with celebrated drama teachers Anne Cooke Reid and Owen Dodson. It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1955 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her master's thesis was titled " Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated". She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.

After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.

In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway.

Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s. Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children - books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."

Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.

Morrison's portrait on the first-edition dust jacket of The Bluest Eye(1970)

The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39. It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music." The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited all but one of Morrison's novels.

In 1975, Morrison's second novel (1973), about a friendship between two Black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a Black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's in 1940. Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

Morrison gave her next novel, (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being Black.

Resigning from Random House in 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus. In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder by white men of Black teenager Emmett Till. The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time. It was produced in 1986 by Capital Repertory Theatre and directed by Gilbert Moses. Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.

Beloved trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987-1998

Morrison, with her sons Ford (left) and Slade (right) at their upstate New York home, between 1980 and 1987

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, . It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate". Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest."

Some critics panned Beloved. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries", and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials".

Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight Black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988. "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve", they wrote. Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said they are intended to be read together, explaining: "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved - the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you." The second novel in the trilogy, , came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. According to Lyn Innes, "Morrison sought to change not just the content and audience for her fiction; her desire was to create stories which could be lingered over and relished, not 'consumed and gobbled as fast food', and at the same time to ensure that these stories and their characters had a strong historical and cultural base."

In 1992, Morrison also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in White American literature. (In 2016, magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.) Lyn Innes wrote in the obituary of Morrison, "Her 1990 series of Massey lectures at Harvard were published as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and explore the construction of a 'non-white Africanist presence and personae' in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and Hemingway, arguing that 'all of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes'."

Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize. In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities". Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations", began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future. Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work".

The third novel of her Beloved Trilogy, , about citizens of an all-Black town, came out in 1997. The following year, Morrison was on the cover of magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second Black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.

Beloved onscreen and "the Oprah effect"

Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandiwe Newton as Beloved.

The movie flopped at the box office. A review in The Economist opined that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes, murder, rape, and slavery". Film critic Janet Maslin, in her New York Times review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy", called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together." Film critic Roger Ebert suggested that Beloved was not a genre ghost story but the supernatural was used to explore deeper issues and the non-linear structure of Morrison's story had a purpose.

In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show. An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments. As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies. John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison's career experienced the boost of " The Oprah Effect, ... enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."

Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's novels a bigger sales boost than they got from her Nobel Prize win in 1993. The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'... I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world." Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution".

Morrison continued to explore different art forms, such as providing texts for original scores of classical music. She collaborated with André Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, which premiered with Kathleen Battle in January 1992, and on Four Songs, premiered at Carnegie Hall with Sylvia McNair in November 1994. Both Sweet Talk: Four Songs on Text and Spirits In the Well (1997) were written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour, and, alongside Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Morrison provided the text for composer Judith Weir's woman.life.song commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, which premiered in April 2000.

Morrison returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novel Beloved, to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner. Completed in 2002, with music by Richard Danielpour, the opera was premièred on May 7, 2005, at the Detroit Opera House with Denyce Graves in the title role.

, Morrison's first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003. In 2004, she put together a children's book called Remember to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

In the spring 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors. In his essay about the choice, "In Search of the Best", critic A. O. Scott said: "Any other outcome would have been startling since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living Black woman, the company of dead White males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home", about which The New York Times said: "In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle."

Morrison's novel , released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. Diane Johnson, in her review in Vanity Fair, called A Mercy "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience."

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, "I don't want to hear about your little life, OK?" Similarly, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.

Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.

Morrison speaking in 2008

Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in the fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home".

On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.

In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature and specifically van Niekerk's 2004 novel Agaat.

Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45, when Morrison's novel (2012) was half-completed.

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. During the commencement ceremony, she delivered a speech on the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth".

Morrison in 2013

In 2011, Morrison worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré on , taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy . The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.

Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died in 2010, later explaining, "I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going ...?'"

She completed and dedicated it to her son Slade. Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.

In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society founded in 1993, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.

Morrison's eleventh novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned, a trauma that has continued to dog Bride.

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of , a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.

While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. She took his last name and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. She was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964. Her second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1965.

Morrison began working as an editor for L.W. Singer Company, a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, New York. She moved with her sons as her career took her to different positions in different places.

Her son Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison was halfway through writing her novel She stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.

Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.

A memorial tribute was held on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Morrison was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat. The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute.

Politics, literary reception, and legacy

Street art depicting Morrison in Vitoria, Spain

Morrison spoke openly about American politics and race relations.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, she claimed that since Whitewater, Bill Clinton was being mistreated in the same way Black people often are:

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.[101]

The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington, D.C., on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president".

In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race." In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, though expressing admiration and respect for the latter. When he won, Morrison said she felt like an American for the first time. She said, "I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid."

In April 2015, speaking of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott - three unarmed Black men killed by white police officers - Morrison said: "People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race.' This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a Black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, "Mourning for Whiteness", published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. In it she argues that white Americans are so afraid of losing privileges afforded them by their race that white voters elected Trump, whom she described as being "endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan", in order to keep the idea of white supremacy alive.

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book - leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity." She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."

In 2012, she responded to a question about the difference between black and white feminists in the 1970s. " Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves", she explained. "They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed."

W. S. Kottiswari writes in Postmodern Feminist Writers (2008) that Morrison exemplifies characteristics of " postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise. Kottiswari states: "Instead of western logocentric abstractions, Morrison prefers the powerful vivid language of women of color ... She is essentially postmodern since her approach to myth and folklore is re-visionist."

A quote from Morrison at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison. Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching.

The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Morrison's decision to offer her papers to Princeton instead of to her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community.

Opening in February 2023, an exhibition titled Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which was curated from her archives at Princeton University, commemorated the 30th anniversary of her winning the Nobel Prize. Running from the week after her birthday until June 4, the exhibition featured rare manuscripts, correspondence between Morrison and others, and unfinished projects, taking its name was from a 1995 essay by Morrison in which she spoke of a "journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply."

Morrison Dining

In 2019, a resolution was passed in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, to designate February 18, her birthday, as Toni Morrison Day. Additional legislation was introduced to also proclaim that date as "Toni Morrison Day" throughout the State of Ohio. The legislation, HB 325, was passed by the Ohio House of Representatives on December 2, 2020, and signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine on December 21.

In 2021, Cornell University opened Toni Morrison Hall, a 178,869 square-foot residence hall and Morrison Dining in 2022, an adjacent dining hall designed by ikon.5 Architects.

During December 2023, the Toni Morrison Collective at Cornell University to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Morrison's Nobel win partered with Calvary Baptist Church to give away free copies of two of Morrison's books and hold book talks in various locations. As explained by Anne V. Adams, professor emerita of Africana studies and comparative literature and chair of the Toni Morrison Collective: "The fact that Toni Morrison, during her first year as a master's student, lodged at a house just a couple of doors up the street from historic Calvary Baptist Church created a perfect context for a collaboration."

Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in London for a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.

Morrison was the subject of a film titled Imagine - Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.

In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014, The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision, explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme. It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown, and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.

In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. People featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake? was a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children nominee in 2008.

"Recitatif" (1983) A hardback book version, with an introduction by Zadie Smith, was published in February 2022 (US: Knopf; UK: Chatto & Windus).

"Sweetness". The New Yorker. Vol. 90, no. 47. February 9, 2015. pp. 58-61.

Foreword and Preface, The Black Book edited by Harris, Levitt, Furman and Smith. Random House (1974), ISBN 978-1400068487

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992, 2007), ISBN 978-0307388636

Editor (2009), Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, ISBN 978-0061878817

The Origin of Others - The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University Press (2017), ISBN 978-0674976450

The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (2019), ISBN 978-0525521037. UK edition published as Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, London: Chatto & Windus (2019), ISBN 978-1784742850

1. ^ Duvall, John N. (2000). The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 38. ISBN 978-0312234027. After all the published biographical information on Morrison agrees that her full name is Chloe Anthony Wofford, so that the adoption of 'Toni' as a substitute for 'Chloe' still honors her given name, if somewhat obliquely. Morrison's middle name, however, was not Anthony; her birth certificate indicates her full name as Chloe Ardelia Wofford, which reveals that Ramah and George Wofford named their daughter for her maternal grandmother, Ardelia Willis.

2. ^ Williams, Dana A. (August 12, 2014). "To Make A Humanist Black: Toni Wofford's Howard Years". In Adrienne Lanier Seward, Justine Tally (ed.). Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781626742048.

3. ^ Hoby, Hermione (April 25, 2015). "Toni Morrison: 'I'm writing for black people ... I don't have to apologize'". The Guardian.

4. Gillespie, Carmen (2007). Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. p. 6. ISBN 978-1438108575.

5. ^ Busby, Margaret (October 9, 1993), "Books: Toni Morrison: beloved and all that jazz ..." Archived April 22, 2019, at the Wayback Machine, The Independent.

6. ^ "'Writers Demand Recognition for Toni Morrison (1988)', June Jordan Houston A. Baker Jr. Statement". July 27, 2012 - via AALBC.com's Discussion Boards.

7. Morrison, Toni, "The Future of Time, Literature and Diminished Expectations," reprinted in Toni Morrison, ^ What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), ISBN 978-1604730173, pp. 170-186.

8. Hawkins, B. Denise, ^ "Marvelous Morrison - Toni Morrison - Award-Winning Author Talks About the Future From Some Place in Time", Archived May 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Diverse Online (formerly Black Issues in Higher Education), June 17, 2007.

9. ^ Young, John K. (January 1, 2001). "Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences". African American Review. 35 (2): 181-204. doi:10.2307/2903252. JSTOR 2903252.

10. ^ Dienst, Karin (November 20, 2017). "Princeton dedicates Morrison Hall in honor of Nobel laureate and emeritus faculty member Toni Morrison". Princeton University.

11. ^ Sciolino, Elaine (October 25, 2011). "Toni Morrison's 'Desdemona' and Peter Sellars's 'Othello'". The New York Times.

12. ^ Gay, Roxane (April 29, 2015). "God Help the Child by Toni Morrison review - 'incredibly powerful'". The Guardian.

13. ^ Hampton, Rachelle (November 22, 2019). "'She Found Us in the Deserts of Ourselves'". . The Slate Group.

14. ^ Alexander, Elizabeth (January 28, 2008). "Our first black president?". . Archived from the original on September 13, 2009. It's worth remembering the context of Toni Morrison's famous phrase about Bill Clinton so we can retire it, now that Barack Obama is a contender

15. "Toni Morrison papers to reside at Princeton". Princeton University Office of Communication. October 17, 2014.

16. Frazier, Charise (September 4, 2019), ^ "Toni Morrison's Hometown Declares Author's Birthday As 'Toni Morrison Day'" Archived February 13, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, MadameNoire.

17. ^ "Honorary Degrees". harvard.edu. Harvard University. Archived from the original on October 15, 2019. 1989 Benazir Bhutto, Toni Morrison LL.D.

18. ^ "Toni Morrison to Deliver NEH's 1996 Jefferson Lecture". The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 9, 1996. ISSN 0009-5982.

19. Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). ^ 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573929638.

20. ^ "Summit Overview Photo". 2007. Hal Prince receives the Golden Plate Award from Awards Council member and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison during the American Academy of Achievement's 2007 Banquet of the Golden Plate gala ceremonies in Washington, D.C.;

21. ^ "National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists for Publishing Year 2014". National Book Critics Circle. January 19, 2015. Archived from the original on January 22, 2015.

22. ^ Dove, Rita, "Sandrof Award: Rita Dove's Homage to Toni Morrison", National Book Critics Circle, March 15, 2015. Retrieved May 10, 2022.

23. ^ "Norton Lectures". Harvard.edu. Harvard University. Archived from the original on November 2, 2016. Harvard's preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term 'poetry' is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts. Past Norton Professors have included T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Leonard Bernstein, Czeslaw Milosz, John Cage, and Nadine Gordimer. The Norton Professor in 2016 is Toni Morrison.

24. ^ "National Women's Hall of Fame Virtual Induction Series Inaugural Event December 10, 2020" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 16, 2022.

25. ^ "National Women's Hall of Fame Virtual Induction Series Inaugural Event December 10, 2020" (PDF). November 11, 2020. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022.

26. ^ Benjamin, Shanna Greene (May 14, 2013). "The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's 'Recitatif'". Studies in American Fiction. 40 (1): 87-106. doi:10.1353/saf.2013.0004. ISSN 2158-5806. S2CID 162497875.

27. ^ Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne (January 28, 2022). "Toni Morrison's Only Short Story Addresses Race by Avoiding Race". The New York Times.

28. ^ Thiessen, Erin Russell (May 26, 2011). "Toni Morrison's Desdemona delivers a haunting, powerful 're-membering'". Expatica - via Neo-Griot.

Quotations related to Toni Morrison at Wikiquote

Media related to Toni Morrison at Wikimedia Commons

"Toni Morrison: Beloved". From the Bookworm archives, August 15, 2019.

Bookworm Archived June 7, 2014, at the Wayback Machine Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt

Schappell, Elissa; Brodsky Lacour, Claudia (Fall 1993). "Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134". The Paris Review. Fall 1993 (128).

Toni Morrison at IMDb

Appearances on C-SPAN

Toni Morrison on Charlie Rose

Toni Morrison on Nobelprize.org

"Reading the Writing: A Conversation with Toni Morrison" (Cornell University video, March 7, 2013)

Toni Morrison at Random House Australia Archived July 26, 2008, at the Wayback Machine

Toni Morrison collected news and commentary at The Guardian

Toni Morrison collected news and commentary at The New York Times

Toni Morrison's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project

Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University Library Special Collections

Toni Morrison Society based at Oberlin College

Works by Toni Morrison at Open Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye , was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

# data[].attributes.body
What was the significance of the Harlem Renaissance, and how did it influence African American culture?

# data[].attributes.body
What is racism and what is the key feature of Harlem Renaissance?

# data[].attributes.body
What problem brought them together ?

# data[].attributes.location_name
Наманганский Государственный Университет

# data[].attributes.body
Friendship

# data[].attributes.body
Harlem Renaissance in American literature

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting

# data[].attributes.body
Interesting

# data[].attributes.body
The reneissance in Harlem began in 1910.

Toni Marrison wrote "The Bluest eye"

The Afroamerican writers play a main role AfroAmerican's freedom.

# data[].attributes.body
African American Harlan renisance

Blue eyes

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To be candid, I was once again thankful to be born into a free life. And from today's topic, I learned about the Blue eyes' dream book. I definitely want to find time to read it😊

# data[].attributes.location_name
Main building of Namangan State University

# data[].attributes.body
1. I learned in lecture today about African American culture, the Harlem Renaissance.

2. I learned about African American writers.

3. And I learned about racism

# data[].attributes.body
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that took place during the 1920s and 1930s.

African American writers have played a significant role in the fight.

The emergence of a new generation of African American artists and intellectuals make the Harlem Renaissance.

# data[].attributes.headline
Say Yes for Freedom (Marjonabonu Halimova)

# data[].attributes.subject
Say Yes for Freedom (Marjonabonu Halimova)

# data[].attributes.body
1. All people in any period always tried to live in freedom, do not be the person who follows the rules of society. You are responsible not only yourself but also your community as well.

2. If you are random person (black, white or other nationality), you can educate others, you can be a leader who changes the world in a positive way!

3. Can you imagine have you ever bullied by your nationality or colour of your body, please keep in mind that it is high time to stop it and fight for your right!

# data[].attributes.headline
Firstly they fought anti-slavery. They were released but At that time, black people were not recognized as individuals. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Firstly they fought anti-slavery. They were released but At that time, black people were not recognized as individuals. 

# data[].attributes.body
Uzbekistan

# data[].attributes.headline
Student:Sotivoldiyeva Maftuna. 1.descrimination between black and white people of American literature

# data[].attributes.subject
Student:Sotivoldiyeva Maftuna. 1.descrimination between black and white people of American literature

# data[].attributes.body
2.Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright are founders of Black Americans

3.This period, renessance ,include in Harlem 1910-1030 years

# data[].attributes.body
I think Harlem Renaissance played a crucial role to build Anerican Literature.Struggles and Injustices faced by Black Anerican were so impressed me.

# data[].attributes.body
The movement Reneissance in Harlem began in 1910

AfroAmerican writaers such as Ruchard Wright,James Baldwin,Longston Hughes play significan role AfroAmerican's freedom

"The Bluest eye" written by Toni Morrison

# data[].attributes.headline
I learnt not to call Africans negro in America otherwise it might be fatal

# data[].attributes.subject
I learnt not to call Africans negro in America otherwise it might be fatal

# data[].attributes.body
During and after the Civil war people who released and got freedom escaped via tunnels to the north

Afro and American writers have played an important role in the fight or civil rights

# data[].attributes.location_name
Наманганский Государственный Университет

# data[].attributes.body
1. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in the 1910-1930s in the United States.

2. It celebrated African American art, music, and literature.

3. African American writers like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin became famous during this time. Their work showed the struggles and joys of African American life.

# data[].attributes.location_name
Namangan State University, ул. Бобуршох, Namangan

# data[].attributes.headline
American and African literature             Raximova Marjona                                

# data[].attributes.subject
American and African literature             Raximova Marjona                                

# data[].attributes.body
1.The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in Harlem , during 1920 and 1930 s

2.Many talented African Americans used this period to share their ideas and change how people saw Black culture in America.

3.Maya Angelou's and Toni Morrison's works discuss gender, and abuse, focusing on its emotional and psychological impact on Black communities.

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The Harlem Renaissance is interesting and useful topic .

It was a time when American art music literature and social commentary flourished

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In today's lesson i learnt about Harlem Reaissance in Anerican literature. I learnt about the cruelty and injustice for Negros (African people) in society and how they faced struggles and inequalities by White people. Despite the injustices of White Americans, The Negros people tried to reach people freedom and demand their independence.

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I learn about Harlem Renaissance in America leterature.Also The works of African writers .For example the novels ,stories and poetry of Maya Angelou

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1."The bluest eye" wrote by  Toni Morison.

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1."The bluest eye" wrote by  Toni Morison.

# data[].attributes.body
2.Famous writer in this period:

Richard Wright

James Baldwin

Langston Haughes and other.

3.Harlem Renaissance developed not only in literature but also it developed in art, music and other fields.

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I learn American and African Lliterature

# data[].attributes.body
African Americans illuminated their freedom through their works. they also mentioned their humiliation and resentment in their works. and the African-American female writer revealed in her most popular work that she longed to remain a white intellectual.

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Today's lesson is African American. We learned about African American literature and writers from that era

# data[].attributes.body
Maya Angelou

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Harlem Renaissance was an American cultural movement that happened during 1910s and 1930s in Harlem, New York.

African American writers and intellectuals sought to present their own culture as well as wanted themselves get full human rights as they were still the lowest class of society in that era

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I learned from this lesson : African American literature and writers of this period.

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American literature

This period lasted from 1910 and 1930

In the period , its themes were social justice and political activism

# data[].attributes.body
Harlan renisance periot 1910 to 1930

Amenrican African

About Blue Eyes

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The development of African American was about renaissanse period.I have learned African American writers and their novels and literature,stories.

# data[].attributes.subject
The development of African American was about renaissanse period.I have learned African American writers and their novels and literature,stories.

# data[].attributes.body
Beautiful things always not good.

# data[].attributes.body
I think Harlem Renaissance is interesting and useful topic. I learned in lecture today about African American culture, the Harlem Renaissance.

# data[].attributes.headline
During the 1920s and 1930s african America art, music, leteratures, social commentary flourished.

# data[].attributes.subject
During the 1920s and 1930s african America art, music, leteratures, social commentary flourished.

# data[].attributes.body
The movement paved the way for future generations of afro America writters.

# data[].attributes.body
1.The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement centered in Harlem, NYC.

2.It highlighted African American achievements in art, music, and literature.

2.Famous figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston.

# data[].attributes.body
The Harlem Renassence was a vibrant cultural movement that emerged during the early 20th century, primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Spanning the 1910s to the mid-1930s, it marked a period of intense creativity and intellectual engagement among African Americans, profoundly influencing American culture and society.

# data[].attributes.location_name
Namangan davlat universiteti, ул. Бобуршох, Namangan

# data[].attributes.body
"The bluest eye" written by Toni Morrison.

The movement Renaissance in Herlem began in 1910.

Famous writer this period: Richard Wright, James Baldwin

# data[].attributes.body
Namangan

# data[].attributes.body
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that took place in Harlem.

The movement Renaissance in Harlem began in 1910.

Famous writer this period: Richard Wright

# data[].attributes.location_name
Namangan State University, ул. Бобуршох, Namangan

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1. They also wanted to showcase

their culture and demonstrate their customs.

# data[].attributes.headline
Harlem Renaissance in American Literature 

# data[].attributes.subject
Harlem Renaissance in American Literature 

# data[].attributes.body
1.Harlem Renaissance period occured in 20th between 1910-1930 years

2.The period was about African and American peaople's working in art music and literature

3.Famous writers were Richard Wright Langstone Hughes

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1.The  Harlem Renaissance was happened in 1910s and 1920s. 

# data[].attributes.subject
1.The  Harlem Renaissance was happened in 1910s and 1920s. 

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2. James Baldwen, Langstone Hughes and Richard Writghts are fighed with their literary works instead of gun during the Civil Wrights and they succeed.

# data[].attributes.body
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that took place in Harlem.American art,music literature and social commentary flourished.

# data[].attributes.body
Two things i have swotted up on Harlem renaissance are cultural movement and American writers in 1920 and 1930.

The first thing is that cultural act tried to eradicate racism.

The second thing is that American writers

and musicians, artists gathered to celebrate black culture to show their own identity.

# data[].attributes.headline
Harlem Renaissance in American literature

# data[].attributes.subject
Harlem Renaissance in American literature

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Culture,African and American writers novels,Stories, and Poetry famous peole!

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Today's topic: Harlem Renaissance was during 20 years.

It was faueled by migration

Toni Morrison - "The bluest eye"