Toni Morrison, indigeneity, and settler colonialism

Abstract

ABSTRACTUsing the lens of settler colonial theory, this article reframes African American author Toni Morrison’s novels to highlight their articulations of comparative histories between African Americans and American Indians. The article reads Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, which explicitly links the US settler colonist projects of indigenous genocide, land control, and the enslavement of African, Caribbean, and American Indian peoples and suggests that indigenous survival in the midst of settler colonial systems serves as a powerful act of resistance. Secondly, this article suggests that Morrison’s use of indigenous cultural signifiers in A Mercy allows us to re-read Morrison’s earlier texts, Beloved (1987) and Paradise (1997), for their depictions of ongoing settler colonialism in the twentieth century. By re-reading novels which have been central to African American studies and to depictions of slavery in the United States, this article demonstrates how settler colonial studies can be used as an analytic to more clearly articulate the intersection of indigenous studies and African American studies.