Toni Morrison's Authorial Audience and the Properties of Black-Centered Imaginative History

Abstract

This essay relates Toni Morrison's critical imperatives concerning the presence of racial formation in reading communities to rhetorical narrative theory's interest in the feedback among author, text, and readers. Through discussions of Morrison's critical writing and of Song of Solomon and Beloved, I examine how Morrison cultivated a Black-centered authorial audience for her texts, guiding readers to acknowledge the authority of Black intraracial dialogue and to wrestle with the sociopolitical implications of her work's imaginative engagement with history. Supplementing ample scholarship on the relationship of Morrison's essays to her fiction, I pay special attention to the forewords Morrison composed for the 2004 reprints of her early novels. In these forewords, Morrison insists on the role of her personal ancestors and ghosts in the production of her fiction, suggesting that the authorial audience's recognition of ghosts enables the robust appreciation and knowledge of Black social experience and history on which she insists.