This week, scholar Marilyn Sanders Mobley visits the AWM to discuss her book Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a “powerful and learned meditation, and one that deserves a prominent place in the field of Morrison studies.” Mobley is joined in conversation by poet Parneshia Jones. This conversation originally took place October 15, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Museum.
More about Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing:
Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of providing “spaces for the reader” to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.
Mobley’s approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrison’s. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment.
Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work.
MARILYN SANDERS MOBLEY is Emerita Professor of English and African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative and a spiritual memoir, The Strawberry Room, and Other Places Where a Woman Finds Herself.
PARNESHIA JONES studied creative writing at Chicago State University and earned an MFA from Spalding University. Her first book Vessel (2015) was the winner of the Midwest Book Award and featured in O, The Oprah Magazine as one of 12 poetry books to savor for National Poetry Month. Her poems have been published in anthologies such as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), Poetry Speaks Who I Am (2010), and She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems (2011), edited by Caroline Kennedy. Jones serves on the boards of Cave Canem and the Guild Complex and the advisory board for UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry. She is the director of Northwestern University Press.