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Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom

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How does Toni Morrison reimagine freedom beyond racial and societal norms, challenging us to rethink liberty through her powerful use of language and storytelling?

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 30, 2024

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This video reflects on the legacy of Toni Morrison, a renowned author and Nobel Prize winner, particularly highlighting her contributions to understanding freedom, race, and language. Morrison, who passed away in 2019, is described as a revolutionary political thinker whose works addressed critical issues on race, slavery, and the meaning of freedom in the U.S.

The writer emphasizes how Morrison’s literature, especially the novel "Beloved," explores the complexities of freedom through the experiences of enslaved individuals, focusing on individual and collective struggles for emancipation. The analysis points out three key features in her works: the portrayal of enslaved women's perspectives, the importance of solidarity under duress, and critiques of the assumptions surrounding white freedom.

Morrison also emphasizes "word work" as a practice of freedom in her Nobel lecture, advocating for a conscious and careful use of language to secure human differences and address the violence done to language itself. Her stories challenge readers to rethink the implications of race and freedom, ultimately asserting that the act of storytelling can forge connection and community in the face of racial terror.

This video concludes by highlighting the contemporary relevance of Morrison’s warnings against censorship and the importance of protecting writers amidst increasing political repression, especially targeting marginalized voices. Through her body of work, Morrison invites readers to participate in the ongoing quest for understanding freedom and navigating the complexities of race in America.

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Here are five key points from the video regarding Toni Morrison's contributions and significance:

1. **Morrison as a Revolutionary Political Thinker**: The video emphasizes that Toni Morrison, while renowned as a Nobel Prize-winning literary artist, is also celebrated as a revolutionary political thinker whose insights into freedom, race, and societal structures have profoundly influenced political theory.

2. **Exploration of Freedom**: Morrison's work, particularly in her novel "Beloved," offers a deep exploration of freedom, illustrating how it is intertwined with race and collective experiences rather than solely individual values. The narrative highlights the struggles of enslaved individuals who understand the true meaning of freedom through their harsh realities.

3. **Language as Agency**: Morrison’s views on language as a form of empowerment (referred to as "word work") highlight its potential to create meaning and shape human experience. However, she also critiques the violence done to language and emphasizes the responsibility of wielding language with care, particularly in addressing issues of race and freedom.

4. **Ethics of Responsibility**: Morrison shifts the notion of responsibility away from blaming marginalized individuals for their circumstances to recognizing the inherent responsibility towards those who have been historically oppressed. She critiques how society often overlooks the struggles and agency of these individuals, especially in the convideo of motherhood and community care.

5. **Threats to Freedom of Expression**: The video acknowledges Morrison's concern over censorship and political repression faced by writers, particularly those from marginalized communities. Her final work warns against the dangers of authoritarianism, emphasizing that the freedom of writers is closely tied to the broader freedom of society. Morrison advocates for the importance of storytelling in fostering ethical debates and community understanding.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video regarding Toni Morrison's contributions and her theoretical insights on language, freedom, and responsibility:

1. **Morrison as a Revolutionary Thinker**: "Morrison has been a guide and essential guide to my own work as a political theorist since I was a graduate student."

2. **Exploration of Freedom**: "One of her greatest and maybe least appreciated contributions is her profound exploration of the meaning of freedom."

3. **Freedom in American Political Discourse**: "Freedom is one of the most inspiring and overused and trivialized words in our political lexicon."

4. **Morrison's Perspective on Freedom**: "She is one of the most acute interpreters of... what it means to live in a nation of people who decided that their worldview would combine agendas for individual freedom with mechanisms for devastating racial oppression."

5. **Freedom in "Beloved"**: "Beloved... makes vivid how women, men, and children living under conditions of extreme duress have struggled to emancipate themselves and to emancipate each other."

6. **Word Work**: "Word work is sublime because it is generative... In Morrison's view, language... is the wellspring of our creativity."

7. **Role of Storytelling**: "Storytelling is where the serious ethical debates are happening. It can move readers to see the world anew."

8. **Responsibility**: "Morrison inverts this idea... she wants to assume responsibility for people no one's ever assumed responsibility for."

9. **Conversations on Home**: "What does it mean... to be at home in my state, the state of Virginia, if you are a black woman, who was enslaved and is now somewhat emancipated?"

10. **Language and Racism**: "It's not possible simply to wish or will racism or sexism away, because they're embedded in the language that she uses."

11. **Collective vs. Individual Freedom**: "She counters the idea that freedom is an individual value and shows how individual freedom is always bound up with the collective."

12. **Warning to Writers**: "Morrison opened her last published book... to warn against the threat of regimes that censor, harass or exile writers."

13. **The Consequences of Censorship**: "It's not just the writers themselves, but everyone's freedom that's at stake."

Each of these quotes encapsulates important themes in Morrison's work and illustrates her influence on the understanding of race, freedom, language, and responsibility in contemporary society.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:90000

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Antonio Morrison died in 2019.

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Angela Davis and Farrah Jasmine Griffin published an op-ed

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in the New York Times in which they hailed her

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as a revolutionary political thinker.

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Um, now she's better known, of course,

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as a Nobel Prize winner, as a literary artist.

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Um, but this formulation,

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Morrison is a revolutionary political thinker,

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struck me as exactly right.

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Um, Morrison has been a guide

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and essential guide to my own work

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as a political theorist since I was a graduate student,

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and especially for thinking about the relationship

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of language and politics.

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Um, political theory in the 1990s when I first started

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graduate school was stunningly silent on the questions

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of race and racism and on slavery, colonialism

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and their legacies Morrison's writings filled that void.

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One of her greatest and maybe least appreciated

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contributions is her profound

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exploration of the meaning of freedom.

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And I first came to understand this, in the classroom.

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Um, that is to say that, as I was working

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with undergraduates, I found,

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that I kept returning to the notion of freedom.

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I should say that this matters in the US

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and Morrison is particularly helpful in this regard,

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because freedom is one of the most inspiring and overused

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and trivi trivialized words in our political lexicon.

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Um, but at this political moment,

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and I think we saw this with the most recent election,

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Americans don't use this word to mean the same thing.

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The meanings are pulling apart.

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And part of the reason for this, I think, is that,

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the US is shaped by our origins,

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as a democratic society founded both in, the value

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of liberty and the right to enslave.

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And this is really where Morrison's work, zeroes in,

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that she, she is one of the most acute, interpreters

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of what she called the question of what, what it means

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to live in a nation of people who decided

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that their worldview would combine agendas

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for individual freedom with mechanisms

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for devastating racial oppression.

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And we see that in all of her work,

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but especially in her 1987 novel, beloved,

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which I frequently inspire in the, inspire,

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a sign in the classroom.

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No, wait. Do that, do that, do that one sentence. Okay.

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Good thing. Okay.

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Um, we see this in all of her work,

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and especially in her 1987 novel, beloved, which I,

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frequently assign in the classroom.

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I think a, a critical text,

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for understanding the meanings of freedom, both in the US

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but also more generally,

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because it's not simply about freedom,

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from the front matter that is from the epigraph

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and the dedication to the very last page,

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beloved makes vivid how women, men,

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and children living under conditions

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of extreme duress have struggled to emancipate themselves

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and to emancipate each other.

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Um, these are people who know what freedom means,

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because they can't take it for granted.

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Morrison, transforms freedom in the novel,

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from a definition or a concept into a living thing.

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It's a profound longing, a fragile achievement,

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and an aspiration that one can touch, taste,

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feel here, as well as know.

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Um, and very quickly, there are three features of the novel

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that I think really illustrate this.

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Um, first, the novel as a story.

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Um, reorients readers away from abstract

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and typically masculine understandings

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of what freedom means.

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Um, she focuses on the vantage of enslaved women, for whom,

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such basic human acts as choosing whom to love

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or caring for their children, was outlawed.

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Um, second, she attends

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to the ways in which people forge solidarity

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under extreme duress.

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So whether it's on, the plantation on the chain gang,

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and the flight from slavery, or in the brutal world,

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after, the Civil War, she counters, the idea

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that freedom is an individual value

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and shows how the individual freedom is

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always bound up with the collective.

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And third, and finally, the vivid portraits that she paints

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of white Americans of enslavers who think they can rise

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above, the institution on which they depend

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of abolitionists, who harbor racist ideas,

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and even of children who are trained into the habits

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of mastery from a very early age,

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cautions against mistaking white freedom,

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for freedom itself.

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And I think this is one of the ways in which she offers a,

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her narratives as a counter, a counterweight

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to the emphasis on freedom as white freedom

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that has defined political theory.

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In the book, I focus on what Morrison calls word work

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as a practice of freedom.

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And she introduces the phrase,

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in her 1997 Nobel lecture on literature,

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and I should say, as an aside, it's available

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through the Nobel Prize website.

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And I, I recommend that anyone,

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with any interest in language in Morrison,

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or just interest in spending a beautiful 40 minutes listen

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to the audio of, of her lecture.

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Um, in that lecture, she says,

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and here I'm quoting that word, work is sublime

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because it is generative.

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It makes meaning that secures our difference,

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our human difference,

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the way in which we are not like no other life language,

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in other words, in Morrison's view, is a kind of agency.

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It's the wellspring of, of our creativity,

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in fact, of our, of our being.

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At the same time, Morrison also addresses the violence

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that is done to language, whether by heads of state,

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by corporate leaders, by academics, by patriots,

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and by many others, and by language,

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the ways in which the use of words can silence or kill.

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Um, and so the Nobel Lecture offers eloquent testimony

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to the generative power of board work,

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and at the same time, to the urgency of wielding that power

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with care for the lives, that it destroys or enables.

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I think even though she pursues this idea

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that language can be liberating in Oliver, work,

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she's especially interested in how the, the novel

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or narrative fiction can be crucial in changing the way

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readers think about the relationship

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between race and freedom.

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In fact, she says that, storytelling is

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where the serious ethical debates are happening.

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Um, and it is a way of forging community in the face of race

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or racial terror, or estrangement.

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It can move readers to see the world anew,

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and it treats the lives of the enslaved, the dispossessed,

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the hunted, as worthy of everyone's concern.

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Um, and we can see this, I think,

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in the way she explores two words.

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Uh, I mean, there are many, many examples,

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but I was thinking about two in particular.

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The first is the word responsibility, which is a word

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that occurs across both her novels,

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and her, her nonfiction writings.

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And in fact, across her interviews, it's a word

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that she spend a lot of time thinking about.

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And I think we often, talk about freedom

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and responsibility as being linked in the sense that,

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you know, for those of us who have children, we tell them

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to make good choices as a condition of their,

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of their freedom.

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Uh, it means being, both having an opportunity to choose

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what to do or to be, and a capacity to do it rightly,

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and Morrison doesn't disagree,

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but where the language

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of personal responsibility has often been used as a kind

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of a cudgel, as a way of blaming people who are vulnerable

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for their situations.

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Morrison inverts this idea, indeed, she says,

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as a novelist, she wants to assume responsibility

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for people no one's ever assumed responsibility for.

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Um, and so what she does is she looks at the lives

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of people, whose situations are most precarious,

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and asks, how it is that they,

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they act accountably to themselves

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and to each other, often in ways that are disregarded by,

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historians and commentators.

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So in Beloved, for instance, you know, being responsible

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for one's children was actually illegal if you were

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an enslaved person.

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Um, and the burden, this burden fell hardest on mothers,

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in ways that I think,

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have their legacies in the contemporary world.

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We see the ways in which, motherhood, especially

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among poor women and women of color, is often criminalized.

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Um, and so the novel follows the remarkable acts

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of creativity and plotting that were required so that,

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especially Seth, who's one of the central characters,

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an enslaved mother, enables her children

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to escape from slavery, struggles to feed

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and to nurture them and to give them a future.

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And at the same time, she shows how many

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of the white characters

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who believed they were the responsible ones, just

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as policymakers today, often figure themselves as,

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as responsible as their chastising, vulnerable people,

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and presume that the freedom

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of the enslaved is rightly in their hands, even

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as they take no responsibility for the injustice of slavery.

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So that's one example.

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Another is the way in which

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Morrison approaches the word home.

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Um, her novels, often focus on people

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who are on the move, and,

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and regularly on the move against their will.

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These are enslaved people.

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These are fugitives, migrants, refugees,

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the dispossessed from the 17th century to the 21st.

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So there's this some amazing kind of scope,

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historical scope in her writing.

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Um, at the same time, she is,

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she, like many feminist thinkers is acutely conscious

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how, violence often takes place inside the home,

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both in the sense of domestic spaces

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and in the sense of a homeland.

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In fact, she's interested in the lives of people

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who are in her words, not at home in their homeland.

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Um, so what does it mean, for instance,

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to be at home in my my state, the state of Virginia,

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if you are a black woman, who was enslaved

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and is now some somewhat emancipated,

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but living with the, the violence

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and the, the ever present threat of dispossession,

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especially if you attempt to act politically, in,

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and how does this notion of home operate

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at a time when anti-black terror was preventing the

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establishment of, multiracial democracy?

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When Morrison talks about home, I think she is trying

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to think about how, in her words,

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to be both free and situated.

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It's something that people deeply desire,

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and it's also something that can kill them.

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Fiction for her becomes a site where she can explore

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these different meanings, how they fit together,

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and how they are intention

230
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or even in mortal contradiction with each other.

231
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Morrison often notes that American English,

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the language in which he writes and thinks

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and dreams is also, the master's tongue.

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That is, it's the language of racial slavery,

235
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of indigenous dispossession.

236
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And it's not possible simply to wish, or to will racism

237
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or sexism away,

238
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because they're embedded in the language that she uses.

239
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Um, so on the one hand, she,

240
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resists the idea, refuses the idea that we can simply

241
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transcend racial categories.

242
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So the idea of, of colorblindness that we can,

243
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just pretend that race doesn't matter

244
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and go on about our business.

245
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Um, and on the other hand, she, she wants to think about

246
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how it is that ra that language can be reshaped,

247
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can be bent, or in her words, manipulated, so

248
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that racial categories retain their historical specificity.

249
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That is, they're still rooted in the experiences of people

250
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who have been raised, but not their capacity to murder.

251
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Um, and so she tries to generate a different kind

252
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of American English that's capacious enough,

253
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to articulate the complexity of US history, to re

254
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to transform a tool of unfreedom into a medium emancipation.

255
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And I think she does this in two ways.

256
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First, she emphasizes that the beauty

257
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and complexity of of black linguistic forms

258
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and cultural traditions, infuse

259
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and structure her art so that she uses,

260
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specific, elements from black history,

261
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phrases in idioms that are, distinct creations

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of African American culture, orality

263
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and emphasis on improvisation, on call response,

264
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and on collective values as a way of trying

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to create a language as her, as she puts it, that is worthy

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of black culture.

267
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At the same time, she also subverts racial categories in

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these really ingenious ways by playing

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with reader's expectations.

270
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So her 1997 novel Paradise opens with a line,

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they shoot the white girl first,

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and then the novel goes on, to tell you who the they is

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or they are, but she refuses

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to divulge which character is the white girl.

275
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And the point here is not to highlight race,

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but to get it out of the way as she puts it, to, to play

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with our expectations to say,

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what do we lose if we actually don't know the racial

279
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identities of the characters?

280
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For sure. And I think the point of both

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of these strategies is to create

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what she calls a shareable world, a way of communicating,

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with people that is not,

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doesn't impose a new order on them,

285
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but invites them to rethink,

286
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to re-see the world that they live in.

287
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And I think it's crucial that she sees fiction writing.

288
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It's not a form of policymaking,

289
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but it is a collaborative enterprise,

290
00:14:05.325 --> 00:14:09.065
and she tries to find ways to bring the reader in,

291
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to enable them in effect, to complete the story.

292
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One thing that I think was extraordinarily prescient was

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that Morrison opened her last published book in 2019,

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a book, a collection of nonfiction, with an essay

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that was entitled Peril.

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Um, this was a speech that she had delivered in 2009,

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but she came back to it 10 years later

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to warn against the threat of regimes that censor,

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harass or exile writers.

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Um, and she appeals to her fellow writers

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to protect each other against the authoritarian

302
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encroachments and to persist in doing the work

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that she sees is distinctly the work of writers.

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And here, I would say both fiction writers and,

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and, writers working

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In, in nonfiction genres as well,

307
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to use their imaginative gifts to translate trauma, cruelty,

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and exploitation into, what I referred, referred

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to a minute ago as a shareable world.

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Um, and I think these words resonate especially forcefully

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today, when writers, particularly women non-white queer

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and other minoritized writers are,

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and their publications have become targets of

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political repression around the world.

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Um, just as, journalists are silenced

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and subjected to violence

317
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or record, no numbers globally in the us,

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where they haven't been threatened personally.

319
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Um, their books are being banned in schools and libraries.

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Morrison's first novel, the Bluest Eye is always on the top

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10 list of books that are banned in the us

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And writers like Morrison who attempt to grapple

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with slavery and its legacies are often depicted

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as woke or even racist.

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Um, while teaching the history of race

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and racism has been legally restricted.

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And Morrison focuses on the peril facing writers.

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She puts readers on notice

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that it's not just the writers themselves,

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but everyone's freedom that's at stake.

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Um, the work of words matter, she says,

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because all next are on the line.

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Um, and I think fortunately, she not only leaves readers

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with a warning, she leaves us with 11 novels

335
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and countless essays and addresses

336
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and other kinds of, of writing that's a testament

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to the generative power of language.

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00:16:19.445 --> 00:16:21.365
I think her work, all of it, enlist readers

339
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as participants in carrying forward her unfinished project

340
00:16:25.225 --> 00:16:26.085
of imagining freedom.

Title: "The Legacy of Toni Morrison: Revolutionary Thinker and Linguist"

00:00:00 - Antonio Morrison died in 2019. Angela Davis and Farrah Jasmine Griffin published an op-ed in the New York Times in which they hailed her as a revolutionary political thinker. now she's better known, of course, as a Nobel Prize winner, as a literary artist. but this formulation, Morrison is a revolutionary political thinker, struck me as exactly right. Morrison has been a guide and essential guide to my own work as a political theorist since I was a graduate student, and especially for thinking about the relationship of language and politics.
00:00:36 - graduate school was stunningly silent on the questions of race and racism and on slavery, colonialism and their legacies Morrison's writings filled that void. One of her greatest and maybe least appreciated contributions is her profound exploration of the meaning of freedom. And I first came to understand this, in the classroom. that is to say that, as I was working with undergraduates, I found,
00:01:09 - I should say that this matters in the US and Morrison is particularly helpful in this regard, because freedom is one of the most inspiring and overused and trivi trivialized words in our political lexicon. but at this political moment, and I think we saw this with the most recent election, Americans don't use this word to mean the same thing. The meanings are pulling apart. And part of the reason for this, I think, is that,

"Exploring Freedom and Oppression in Toni Morrison's Work"

00:01:39 - as a democratic society founded both in, the value of liberty and the right to enslave. And this is really where Morrison's work, zeroes in, that she, she is one of the most acute, interpreters of what she called the question of what, what it means to live in a nation of people who decided that their worldview would combine agendas for individual freedom with mechanisms for devastating racial oppression.
00:02:09 - but especially in her 1987 novel, beloved, which I frequently inspire in the, inspire, a sign in the classroom. No, wait. Do that, do that, do that one sentence. Okay. Good thing. Okay. we see this in all of her work, and especially in her 1987 novel, beloved, which I, frequently assign in the classroom. I think a, a critical text, for understanding the meanings of freedom, both in the US
00:02:40 - because it's not simply about freedom, from the front matter that is from the epigraph and the dedication to the very last page, beloved makes vivid how women, men, and children living under conditions of extreme duress have struggled to emancipate themselves and to emancipate each other. these are people who know what freedom means, because they can't take it for granted. Morrison, transforms freedom in the novel, from a definition or a concept into a living thing.

"Redefining Freedom: The Collective Struggle Through Morrison's Lens"

00:03:14 - and an aspiration that one can touch, taste, feel here, as well as know. and very quickly, there are three features of the novel that I think really illustrate this. first, the novel as a story. reorients readers away from abstract and typically masculine understandings of what freedom means. she focuses on the vantage of enslaved women, for whom, such basic human acts as choosing whom to love
00:03:46 - second, she attends to the ways in which people forge solidarity under extreme duress. So whether it's on, the plantation on the chain gang, and the flight from slavery, or in the brutal world, after, the Civil War, she counters, the idea that freedom is an individual value and shows how the individual freedom is always bound up with the collective. And third, and finally, the vivid portraits that she paints
00:04:19 - above, the institution on which they depend of abolitionists, who harbor racist ideas, and even of children who are trained into the habits of mastery from a very early age, cautions against mistaking white freedom, for freedom itself. And I think this is one of the ways in which she offers a, her narratives as a counter, a counterweight to the emphasis on freedom as white freedom

"Exploring 'Word Work': Toni Morrison's Concept of Language as Agency and Power"

00:04:49 - In the book, I focus on what Morrison calls word work as a practice of freedom. And she introduces the phrase, in her 1997 Nobel lecture on literature, and I should say, as an aside, it's available through the Nobel Prize website. And I, I recommend that anyone, with any interest in language in Morrison, or just interest in spending a beautiful 40 minutes listen to the audio of, of her lecture.
00:05:19 - and here I'm quoting that word, work is sublime because it is generative. It makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference, the way in which we are not like no other life language, in other words, in Morrison's view, is a kind of agency. It's the wellspring of, of our creativity, in fact, of our, of our being. At the same time, Morrison also addresses the violence that is done to language, whether by heads of state, by corporate leaders, by academics, by patriots,
00:05:52 - the ways in which the use of words can silence or kill. and so the Nobel Lecture offers eloquent testimony to the generative power of board work, and at the same time, to the urgency of wielding that power with care for the lives, that it destroys or enables. I think even though she pursues this idea that language can be liberating in Oliver, work, she's especially interested in how the, the novel

"Storytelling as a Framework for Ethical Responsibility and Community in Morrison's Work"

00:06:24 - readers think about the relationship between race and freedom. In fact, she says that, storytelling is where the serious ethical debates are happening. and it is a way of forging community in the face of race or racial terror, or estrangement. It can move readers to see the world anew, and it treats the lives of the enslaved, the dispossessed, the hunted, as worthy of everyone's concern. and we can see this, I think,
00:06:55 - I mean, there are many, many examples, but I was thinking about two in particular. The first is the word responsibility, which is a word that occurs across both her novels, and her, her nonfiction writings. And in fact, across her interviews, it's a word that she spend a lot of time thinking about. And I think we often, talk about freedom and responsibility as being linked in the sense that, you know, for those of us who have children, we tell them to make good choices as a condition of their,
00:07:26 - it means being, both having an opportunity to choose what to do or to be, and a capacity to do it rightly, and Morrison doesn't disagree, but where the language of personal responsibility has often been used as a kind of a cudgel, as a way of blaming people who are vulnerable for their situations. Morrison inverts this idea, indeed, she says, as a novelist, she wants to assume responsibility for people no one's ever assumed responsibility for.

"Exploring Responsibility and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'"

00:07:59 - of people, whose situations are most precarious, and asks, how it is that they, they act accountably to themselves and to each other, often in ways that are disregarded by, historians and commentators. So in Beloved, for instance, you know, being responsible for one's children was actually illegal if you were an enslaved person. and the burden, this burden fell hardest on mothers,
00:08:31 - have their legacies in the contemporary world. We see the ways in which, motherhood, especially among poor women and women of color, is often criminalized. and so the novel follows the remarkable acts of creativity and plotting that were required so that, especially Seth, who's one of the central characters, an enslaved mother, enables her children to escape from slavery, struggles to feed and to nurture them and to give them a future.
00:09:02 - of the white characters who believed they were the responsible ones, just as policymakers today, often figure themselves as, as responsible as their chastising, vulnerable people, and presume that the freedom of the enslaved is rightly in their hands, even as they take no responsibility for the injustice of slavery. So that's one example. Another is the way in which Morrison approaches the word home. her novels, often focus on people

"Exploring the Complexities of Home, Freedom, and Violence in Toni Morrison's Work"

00:09:36 - and regularly on the move against their will. These are enslaved people. These are fugitives, migrants, refugees, the dispossessed from the 17th century to the 21st. So there's this some amazing kind of scope, historical scope in her writing. at the same time, she is, she, like many feminist thinkers is acutely conscious how, violence often takes place inside the home,
00:10:08 - and in the sense of a homeland. In fact, she's interested in the lives of people who are in her words, not at home in their homeland. so what does it mean, for instance, to be at home in my my state, the state of Virginia, if you are a black woman, who was enslaved and is now some somewhat emancipated, but living with the, the violence and the, the ever present threat of dispossession, especially if you attempt to act politically, in,
00:10:44 - at a time when anti-black terror was preventing the establishment of, multiracial democracy? When Morrison talks about home, I think she is trying to think about how, in her words, to be both free and situated. It's something that people deeply desire, and it's also something that can kill them. Fiction for her becomes a site where she can explore these different meanings, how they fit together, and how they are intention or even in mortal contradiction with each other.

"Language as a Site of Power and Resistance in Morrison's Work"

00:11:14 - the language in which he writes and thinks and dreams is also, the master's tongue. That is, it's the language of racial slavery, of indigenous dispossession. And it's not possible simply to wish, or to will racism or sexism away, because they're embedded in the language that she uses. so on the one hand, she, resists the idea, refuses the idea that we can simply transcend racial categories.
00:11:46 - just pretend that race doesn't matter and go on about our business. and on the other hand, she, she wants to think about how it is that ra that language can be reshaped, can be bent, or in her words, manipulated, so that racial categories retain their historical specificity. That is, they're still rooted in the experiences of people who have been raised, but not their capacity to murder.
00:12:16 - of American English that's capacious enough, to articulate the complexity of US history, to re to transform a tool of unfreedom into a medium emancipation. And I think she does this in two ways. First, she emphasizes that the beauty and complexity of of black linguistic forms and cultural traditions, infuse and structure her art so that she uses,

"Reimagining Race and Language: The Innovative Narrative Techniques of Toni Morrison"

00:12:46 - phrases in idioms that are, distinct creations of African American culture, orality and emphasis on improvisation, on call response, and on collective values as a way of trying to create a language as her, as she puts it, that is worthy of black culture. At the same time, she also subverts racial categories in these really ingenious ways by playing with reader's expectations.
00:13:17 - they shoot the white girl first, and then the novel goes on, to tell you who the they is or they are, but she refuses to divulge which character is the white girl. And the point here is not to highlight race, but to get it out of the way as she puts it, to, to play with our expectations to say, what do we lose if we actually don't know the racial identities of the characters? For sure. And I think the point of both of these strategies is to create
00:13:48 - with people that is not, doesn't impose a new order on them, but invites them to rethink, to re-see the world that they live in. And I think it's crucial that she sees fiction writing. It's not a form of policymaking, but it is a collaborative enterprise, and she tries to find ways to bring the reader in, to enable them in effect, to complete the story. One thing that I think was extraordinarily prescient was that Morrison opened her last published book in 2019,

"Defending the Power of Words: Morrison's Call to Protect Writers Against Censorship"

00:14:22 - that was entitled Peril. this was a speech that she had delivered in 2009, but she came back to it 10 years later to warn against the threat of regimes that censor, harass or exile writers. and she appeals to her fellow writers to protect each other against the authoritarian encroachments and to persist in doing the work that she sees is distinctly the work of writers. And here, I would say both fiction writers and, and, writers working
00:14:53 - to use their imaginative gifts to translate trauma, cruelty, and exploitation into, what I referred, referred to a minute ago as a shareable world. and I think these words resonate especially forcefully today, when writers, particularly women non-white queer and other minoritized writers are, and their publications have become targets of political repression around the world. just as, journalists are silenced
00:15:22 - or record, no numbers globally in the us, where they haven't been threatened personally. their books are being banned in schools and libraries. Morrison's first novel, the Bluest Eye is always on the top 10 list of books that are banned in the us And writers like Morrison who attempt to grapple with slavery and its legacies are often depicted as woke or even racist. while teaching the history of race and racism has been legally restricted. And Morrison focuses on the peril facing writers.

"Language as Liberation: The Lasting Legacy of Toni Morrison"

00:15:55 - that it's not just the writers themselves, but everyone's freedom that's at stake. the work of words matter, she says, because all next are on the line. and I think fortunately, she not only leaves readers with a warning, she leaves us with 11 novels and countless essays and addresses and other kinds of, of writing that's a testament to the generative power of language. I think her work, all of it, enlist readers as participants in carrying forward her unfinished project
00:16:25 -

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