Dancing Minds and Plays in the Dark: Intersections of Fiction and Critical Texts in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Abstract

Paul Gilroy, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture (1994), writes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved “It is a novel, not a manifesto, but it insists on an entirely new aesthetic and political agenda” (176). Notably, Gilroy’s disclaimer emerges out of his assertion that “‘Beloved arrived at a special and difficult time’ in black American letters”—a time when “selective mass-marketing” of black women writers “had opened up a considerable rift in the black community” and a time when black cultural aestheticians debated each other along gender lines about the representation of black male and female relationships and these relationships’ “cartoon-style representations on the big screen.” “In one graceful movement,” Gilroy claims, “Beloved brought these disputes to an end” (176).1KeywordsBlack PeopleWoman WriterCritical TextNarrative StrategyRacial PurityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.