Marilyn Sanders Mobley: Toni Morrison and Geopoetics (ONLINE)

Emerita Professor of English and African American Studies Marilyn Sanders Mobley visits the American Writers Museum to discuss her recent 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 by poet Parneshia Jones. Published by Temple University Press.

This event is the live online broadcast of an in-person event. When you register for this event you will get a link to view the broadcast via Zoom. If you would like to attend the event in-person at the American Writers Museum, register here.

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.