Toni Morrison’s female epistemology: post-nationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial futures in Tar Baby, Mouth Full of Blood, and Paradise

Toni Morrison has been considered primarily as a writer concerned to recover the ancestor in charting specifically African American histories, and yet contemporary theorisations of diaspora, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism may now be employed to illuminate her work as both novelist and as public intellectual. For example, we can approach her fourth novel Tar Baby (1981) as being Morrison’s presentation of a female protagonist, Jadine Childs, as an emblematic transnational figure, one who eventually returns to Paris, the site of diasporic transnationalism, to engage at last with her diasporic, female identity. It is in Tar Baby, set in the period in which it was written, that Morrison anticipates twenty-first century debates around identity and what it means to be a black, educated, and mobile woman. In this regard, Morrison’s reflections in her essays and addresses on feminism, education, and postcolonialism, brought together in Mouth Full of Blood (2019), also help enable nuanced readings of Tar Baby and offer new possibilities for diasporic futures. In this chapter I am concerned, firstly, with Morrison’s engagement with black nationalism in the post-civil rights era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as represented in the gendered “contentions” (Morrison, 1981, Epigraph) between Jadine, the assimilationist black model and Son, the black nationalist. I also consider Morrison’s non-fiction, as collated in Mouth Full of Blood, and the ways in which Morrison mediates marginalised, peripheral knowledge into an effective and counter epistemology to challenge established hegemonic knowledge claims and nationalisms. I conclude by arguing that Morrison’s critique of black nationalism, first evident in Tar Baby, becomes the main concern of her fin de siècle novel, Paradise (1998)