A three-day international symposium on Toni Morrison's third novel Song of Solomon (on the syllabus for the agrégation) to assess its status as a canonical work and to offer radical new readings: is this work of its time (the 70s) or does it herald the post-Obama years?

We will focus on the novel as a polyphony of black voices blending the biblical and the vernacular, Greek mythology and African myth, the dirty dozens and children’s rhymes in a form of “folk” writing. The question of whether one can listen, rather than read, is a key to the novel.

Workshops will be dedicated to Morrison's language and the novel's intertextualities, her ethical imagination, Black masculinities, the reader's role and the ambivalence at the core of the writing. The documentary The Pieces I am will also be discussed.