Call for papers

This symposium will be devoted to Toni Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), some 43 years after it was published and to the questions that such a perspective raises: 

Is the novel, in a mise en abyme of the issues of black heritage and forms of historical and cultural legacy that it thematizes, now a “classic” of American literature? In retrospect, is it an early work, or a masterpiece in its own right, years before Beloved? Can it be read through the later works of Morrison’s diverse output? 

Is this National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and on Barack Obama’s reading list, a canonical work precisely because it reached multiple publics and remains aesthetically and politically challenging? 

 Is it “of its time”–contemporary to Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and a forerunner to Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981)–and only to be read as bracketed within a specific African American literary moment (Warren 2011)? Or is it paradoxically entirely relevant again in the context of the whitelash since the election of Donald Trump and the chilling increase of white supremacist violence? Morrison’s The Origin of Others(2017) was prefaced by Ta-Nehisi Coates in what is now the age of Black Lives Matter. Is Guitar, the Black Power character, as much of our time (and perhaps more) than he appeared to readers of 1977? 

 This symposium will highlight how, in its reflexive performance of blackness, Song of Solomon stands out as a celebration of black voices, song, names, and history, in a powerful remembering (of) generations (Rushdy 2001). Taking up Cheryl Wall’s pun on Black women writers and literary intertexts, we will ask how Morrison’s story of Milkman’s quest worries the line (2005). Looking back from almost a half century, we will highlight how this proud counterhistory allows readers the freedom to remember (Mitchell 2002) a buried past, through myths, legends and flying ancestors, and how it combines the tragic and traumatic with various forms of black signifyin’ and black humor. Finally, 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.  

All approaches, whether in literature, cultural studies, Black Feminism, masculinity studies, ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, narratology, (etc.) are encouraged. Papers should tackle the work from a decidedly new perspective.

Bibliography

Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember. Narrative, Slavery and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Rushdy, Ashraf. Remembering Generations. Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line. Black Women Writers, Lineage and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books, 2005.

Warren, Kenneth. What was African American Literature? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.