The construction, destruction and reconfiguration of a community in Toni Morrison’s Sula

In the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of African-Americans abandoned the southern states and went to the North. The aim of this journey was to escape the persecutions and lynching that darkened each day of the lives of the black people in the South. During this process, they had to learn the ways and customs of the North and had to adapt to a different landscape and climate. In this paper, I intend to study: a) The different attitudes that, in Toni Morrison’s Sula, African-Americans and European-Americans present in relation to the land; b) The tensions and dilemmas that derive from these two opposite perspectives; c) The way in which capitalist progress alters the modus vivendi and the identity of a rural African-American community. In order to do so, I resort to the novel of Toni Morrison and to several interviews she granted, to the work of several specialists in Literary and Cultural Studies, as well as to my own opinion