Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color. By Anissa Janine Wardi

Abstract

“The fusion of history onto the natural world is the very bedrock of African American ecocritical thought” writes Anissa Janine Wardi in the introduction of Toni Morrison and the Natural World (5). Few writers exemplify the inextricability of Blackness and the environment like Toni Morrison, whose works—including Sula (1973), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), among others—deal explicitly with the complex intermeshing of Black and natural histories. Building on a long tradition of ecocriticism that has largely ignored African American literature, Wardi applies a new method focused on the interrelationality between community and environment. In her analysis, the biophysical world is as important as Morrison’s novels: from connecting the etymological roots of diaspora, to seed spreading, to analyzing the life cycle of regeneration through fire, Wardi’s writing is focused, well-researched, delightfully critical and prompts further curiosity and study. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is comprised of four chapters and a conclusion, each of which centers a particular color (e.g. “Orange Ecology, Death, and Renewal: Fire, Ash, and Immolation in God Help and Sula”). Drawing also on the five senses—taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight—as an organizing concept, Wardi engages the reader through their own observations, marrying the personal to the political through the book’s signal colors (brown, green, blue, and orange) and all of the various overlaps among these hues.