Mapping geographies of resistance in Toni Morrison's paradise (1998)‎

Abstract EN

This paper offers a new critical reading of Toni Morrison's acute historical and spatial conceptualization of the black experience in her 1998 novel Paradise.

By situating the novel within a new context that takes up spatiality and resistance as key paradigms in defining the black experience of marginality, we suggest that Morrison reconsiders the complicated history of the Black people in America through a critical geography that encompasses two main resistant geographies, Haven and the town of Ruby.

In associating Haven with mythmaking, Morrison's text reproduces a map that overrides the puritan mythic vision of America as a paradise.

Besides, we deduced that the all-black town of Ruby represents a counter-geography that implies locating black identity in relation to place-making.

This implication proffers a counterhegemonic discourse that overturns the image of Blacks as peripherally situated and it demonstrates the transformative politics of place-making in asserting black agency.