The Reconstitution of American Identity: Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison's <em>A Mercy</em>

Abstract

68 CLA JOURNAL The Reconstitution of American Identity: Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy1 Kwangsoon Kim In his commentary on African American historical novels, Keith Byerman asserts that “the very choice of history as subject is determined by authors’ experiences of the recent and the present”(2).If America is moving into a postracial era with all-time high black achievement economically and politically, as Byerman puts it, “it could be considered pointless and even counterproductive to insist on a race-oriented history” (4). However, contemporary African American historical novels, Byerman argues, “are motivated in part by precisely a recognition of both current prosperity and deprivation” (4), and black novelists are responding to a particular contemporary issue in their return to history. When Toni Morrison returned to the seventeenth century colonial American setting in her ninth novel, A Mercy, the immediate responses associated the author’s “experiences of the recent and the present” (Byerman 2) with “the currency of twenty-first century ‘post-racial’ political platforms due to President Obama’s successful campaign” (Kadel 28). Moreover, the publisher encouraged this association between Morrison’s novel and the era of a Black president by intentionally adjusting the book’s publication schedule and releasing it on November 11, 2008, one week after Barack Obama’s election. In addition, while the media began to describe Obama’s era as being postracial, Toni Morrison used the word “pre-racial” to describe seventeenth-century colonial America in her interview with National Public Radio (“Toni Morrison on Human Bondage”). Paying particular attention to the semantic relationship between the media’s perception of “post-racial(-ity)” and Morrison’s use of the term “pre-racial,” most reviewers and critics have characterized Morrison’s novel as a novel that celebrated the new “post-racial” American era—an era that was about to begin with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. Boris Kachka viewed Morrison’s A Mercy as a novel that employed a “redemptive tone” that was “felt even more keenly [during] an election year with a full deck of race cards” (“Toni Morrison’s History Lesson”), and Bob Thompson commented that Morrison’snovel“servesasathought-provokingbookendtotheeraweareentering” (“Interesting Times”). Tim Adams used a more celebratory tone in the review he wrote before the presidential election day:“That this book will be published in the week before her nation may choose a President who for the first time could eclipse that [racial] divide, who could make ‘them’‘us,’ lends it a fundamental resonance” (“Return of the Visionary”). These critics, as Lauren Elise Kadel puts it, imply that CLA JOURNAL 69 Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy “heralding a ‘post-racial’ twenty-first century political milieu nostalgically points to Morrison’s imagined ‘pre-racial’ landscape” (29). In other words, they assume that Morrison returned to history for this novel because of her recent experience as an ardent supporter of Barack Obama and that she set her novel in pre-racial America in order to preemptively imagine this upcoming “post-racial” America under the newly elected African American president. All of this begs the following question: Did Morrison’s A Mercy truly intend to correspond to and celebrate the political climate that propelled and surrounded the advent of a black president in the White House? Did Morrison believe that the election of President Barack Obama would propel twenty-first century America into a new postracial era? Will contemporary postracial America be similar to the “pre-racist”America“before it [that it, racism] all got institutionalized”(Morrison, “President-Elect”)? In reality, Morrison was wary of critical responses that bound up her novel in the political discourse surrounding the election of America’s first black president. Morrison jokingly touched upon this link between A Mercy and Obama’s election: “I really like President-Elect Obama, but I wish he’d stay out of my book reviews and things” (“America Before Slavery” 23). When asked if “we’re in a quote ‘post-racial’ time before the election of Senator Obama,” Morrison unequivocally answered that she did not expect the Obama era to be definitely postracial: “I’m not...