toni morrison the site of memory essay

On Excavating the Novel and “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory”

Jasmine liu visits princeton university library’s exhibition of toni morrison’s archive., by jasmine liu may 6, 2023.

Literary Criticism

HOWEVER UNLIKELY a place to begin one’s critical investigations, I have always read the forewords of novels eagerly, with a hope that the writer will let slip crucial details about their sources of inspiration and creative process. Recently, in preparing to visit an exhibition of Toni Morrison’s process papers, “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” on view at Princeton University Library, I became fascinated with Morrison’s forewords to her novels—succinct yet highly technical exegeses of her creative muses, opening sentences, archival practices, and historical and psychological preoccupations.

My specific attraction to her forewords, I suspect, emanates from the contrast they draw with her novels, which construct imaginative universes so whole and total in their details, signs, and inhabitants that I frequently find them overwhelming. For me, navigating Morrison’s fictional worlds—awash with smells, colors, textures, flowers, and foliage—is much like traveling to a new city or country where my own feeling of foreignness is palpable. Her forewords offer to demystify the creation of these worlds.

“I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to,” Toni Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993. In her forewords, she lets readers in on what these questions are. The Bluest Eye (1970), her debut novel, was precipitated by a question that came to haunt her while she worked her day job as an editor at Random House: what were the “tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident?” The answer took shape in Pecola, one of the most miserable, abject young girls to exist in English-language literature; the book would launch Morrison’s multi-decade career as the United States’ preeminent novelist and writer. Her second novel, Sula (1973), grew out of her interest in “outlaw women,” an interest that would persist through decades. What, she wondered, were the consequences of “a woman’s escape from male rule […] on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship”?

Oftentimes her questions were sparked by flares from the historical archive that left afterimages that just wouldn’t let her go. The protagonist of Beloved (1987) was inspired by Margaret Garner—a historical figure Morrison encountered in her research for The Black Book (1974), a collection on Black life in America through the centuries. In interviews, Garner, who killed her own daughter to forestall a life of enslavement, calmly asserted that she would do it again if she had to. “That was more than enough to fire my imagination,” Morrison said. Later, she was captivated by a photograph by the famous documentarian James Van Der Zee. The image was of a 1920s funeral, and staged dramatically at its center was the open casket of a young woman who had been shot by her lover. What had led to this end? She needed to know. The image became the seed for her 1992 novel Jazz .

Work on The Black Book would be an inexhaustible source of creativity for Morrison. As she pored over “colored newspapers” and photographs from the period after emancipation, she discovered repeated exhortations for formerly enslaved people to move to utopian Black towns. She couldn’t help noticing, however, that the governors of these towns all seemed to be light-skinned. This made her question what it would mean to be freed from slavery only to again be confronted with colorism in a place marketed as a racial haven. What were the features that people sought from paradise anyway? That became the subject of Paradise (1998).

Like a scholar who enters an archive, Morrison embarked on each of her novels in search of an answer, only to emerge with more and more questions. Morrison’s forewords act as research abstracts, aligning readers with her inciting questions, and positioning them toward paths of further scrutiny. Professionally, she conceived of herself chiefly as an editor for much of her career and felt that she could see better than most how writers worked—their “process, how [their] mind worked, what was effortless, what took time, where the ‘solution’ to a problem came from.” She writes in her 1995 essay “The Site of Memory” that, for her, the resulting book was “the least important aspect of the work.” Revisiting her forewords and scrutinizing her archive, I am very much inclined to agree.

“Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory” is loosely grouped into six categories. There are relics from Morrison’s schooling, when she served as an editor at her high school newspaper and participated in dramatic productions; early correspondence with editors who offered different advice on how she should proceed with her work; copious outlines, notes, and drafts for Beloved , Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz , and Paradise ; and letters from such figures as Toni Cade Bambara and Nina Simone.

A first edition of The Bluest Eye included in the library’s exhibition succinctly demonstrates how her creative process mirrors the formal qualities of her finished work. Morrison’s trade paperback editions today have a uniform look —two-tone Vintage imprint covers with elegant, calligraphic title fonts. The unfussiness of The Bluest Eye ’s first edition cover , designed by Morrison herself, is a tonic; printed plainly in standard Times New Roman font are the novel’s three opening paragraphs, which efficiently lay out the kernel of its narrative scandal.

The effect of the design has much to do with the power of the novel’s first lines. Pecola, who we learn wishes for nothing more desperately than blue eyes, is pregnant with her father’s child. The matter-of-fact way in which we are presented this disturbing detail suggests that we too are residents of Lorain, Ohio, so we must already know the story. For Morrison, immediately imparting this knowledge of rape and incest liberates her to pursue the narrative aims she really cares about. By revealing the entire plot at the outset, she said in an interview, she would know that anyone who kept reading did so for one of two reasons—to find out how it happened, or for love of the language. In other words, as she writes in the novel’s first lines, “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

Morrison was a ravenous researcher. Her hunger for archival materials was the product of a foundational lack—the absence of interiority in narratives chronicling Black American life. In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison wrote of the development of the African American literary canon from slave narratives to abolition tracts to contemporary fiction. She argued that Black writers had been stuck writing for white audiences; historically, their principal concern was with representing themselves in a sympathetic manner that would be productive for the cause of emancipation and later the securing of civil rights. But this meant omitting ugly and unpalatable truths. “Over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate,’” she wrote, attributing such rhetorical maneuvers to writers as diverse as Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. Because writing by Black people up until Morrison’s time had served as an exercise in packaging the Black experience for a white gaze, rarely did Black writers train their gaze inward, at least not for publication. “For me—a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman—the exercise is very different,” she wrote.

This new historical position that Morrison occupied demanded new techniques. For her, this took form in a process she called “literary archaeology.” “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply,” she explained.

While writing Jazz , Morrison read every single Black newspaper published in the year 1926, and fragments of her research and source materials for the novel are on view at Princeton’s Firestone Library. Set in New York in the 1920s, Jazz —much like the African American musical form that so entranced Morrison—is improvisational, polyvocal, and atmospheric. Between the thriving publishing culture and the rich photography of the Harlem Renaissance, Morrison would have had an abundant historical archive to work with. In one message fired off to an assistant at the time, she included research requests for “some photographs of streets in fairly nice residential neighborhoods in mid-nineteenth century”; “a 1925 and 1926 discography of blues recorded during those years”; and “more, and as much more as possible, on the East St. Louis riots and the response among Black people.” She also inquired about when Coney Island was established as a resort, whether it was segregated, and what Jim Crow laws were like on trains in the 1920s. Morrison was seduced by the romance of the Jazz Age and the backlash that ensued—the liberation, sexual and otherwise, that also engendered moral puritanism and chauvinist violence. This was a dynamic that she returned to repeatedly in books like Sula and Paradise .

Also collected in the exhibition is a typewritten set of notes titled “Jazzthoughts” in which Morrison puzzled through what she called the “bookvoice” of Jazz . Jazz, with its meandering, shape-shifting narration that features the voices of several female main characters as well as an anonymous narrator who occasionally addresses the reader in the second person , is often considered Morrison’s most experimental work. By the end, the narrator undermines their own authority, admitting that their conclusions are unreliable, their motivations biased and suspect.

Reading Morrison’s process notes on the bookvoice she hoped to achieve, I wondered if it sufficed as a description of her own positionality vis-à-vis the archive. “This bookvoice is shaken by its stumbling understanding of the personal histories of the characters—but resists any visceral or intellectual understanind [ sic ],” she writes. Only later in Jazz , “the bookvoice recognizes its errors of perception, the fact that it had a taste for pain, that it missed the people altogether and thereby missed the real possibilities of human love and reconciliation.” At the conclusion of hours and hours of research into obscure Black lives, speculating on their insecurities, their drives, and all those things that make up our interiority, she turned her own gaze inward.

I have no memory for details about places I’ve been. Perhaps because of this, almost all of the paragraphs upon paragraphs of Morrison’s prose that I have transcribed by hand are descriptions of interiors, skies, plants, and trees. Even without the evidence of Morrison’s papers, her meticulousness in thinking about physical space is obvious. Her notes, which include blueprints, maps, and diagrams relating physical locations to emotions, confirm that visualizing and exercising spatial precision was an important part of how she probed the psychology of her characters.

Sometimes her spaces were characters. The haunted house, 124, wherein reside Sethe and Denver, Beloved ’s isolated and ostracized mother and daughter, is “spiteful,” an entity with which they must wage “a perfunctory battle.” Its sideboards “step forward,” slop jars arbitrarily overturn, “gusts of sour air” blow. Sethe accepts her lot to coexist with 124’s venomous and retributive unruliness, an attitude that illuminates the way she conceives of herself in relation to their neighbors and their fate. On one piece of paper displayed in the “Thereness-ness” section of “Sites of Memory,” Morrison scrawled the layout of the ground floor of 124. Next to it, she analogized the inside and outside of 124 to two principal characters: the former with Sethe, who she associated in her notes with a “retreat into fantasy/invention” and a rejection of “what rejects her,” and the latter with Stamp, a character she associated with “community obligations to the weakest link,” “news of the world,” and “moral war.”

But the most intricate physical space that Morrison developed was Convent, in Paradise . A former Catholic abbey turned female co-op, Convent is a mansion that functions as the nerve center for a ragtag intergenerational set of women who have rejected romantic and familial attachments in favor of living together, “seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other.” Once again, Morrison plops the most shocking plot point down on the novel’s first page: a group of men from the nearby town of Ruby have come to Convent on a murderous rampage, ready to commit a spectacular act of violence. But reading Paradise ’s opening scene, it is possible to forget that these men are there to kill. As they progress through the many open spaces and hallways of the mansion, the narrator lapses into an objective, meditative cadence.

The ornate and newly co-opted mansion once belonged to an embezzler, and the narrator carefully enumerates all these luxuries, including “bisque and rose-tone marble floors [that] segue into teak ones,” “princely tubs and sinks,” “macramé baskets,” “Flemish candelabra,” a bathtub that “rests on the backs of four mermaids.” Also ingrained in the mansion’s history is the fact that it served for a time as a boarding school for Arapaho children who were forced, under the instruction of Catholic nuns, to undergo an “education” of cultural erasure. We learn that the nuns have dutifully removed the marble carvings of nymphs throughout Convent, but remnants of nymphean hair still remain. Although the figure of the embezzler stays out of view, largely irrelevant to the concerns of the novel, we become intimately familiar with his biography, and his paranoia, because we spend so much time in the very particular architecture of his home. The building’s layered pasts rise to the novel’s surface, as various built-in memories prompt the men of Paradise to reflect on how they wound up in Ruby, and how times have changed.

Morrison’s pencil-and-paper sketches are a record of how she translated the embezzler’s neurosis into materiality and how she arrived at the mansion’s fantastical psychological design, which was constructed for “voluptuous part[ies]” and shaped after “a live cartridge,” with its interior sunlight “always misleading.” In Paradise , references to the architecture of Convent serve the double function of calling readers back to the story-within-a-story of the embezzler, one that has the compact power of microfiction. In her drawings, Morrison notes the function of each room, marking the locations of doors, stairs, and passageways that residents and intruders would pass through. Convent—by maximizing the potentials of symbolism, irony, and the affective impact of different qualities of space (light, shape, material)—theatrically stages the dramatic power of constructing a place through excavating its many histories.

From the peculiar and portentous bullet-shaped mansion, we surmise that shapes were meaningful to Morrison. She wrote like a synesthete, and much like her relationship to color, she had an oracular intuition for shapes too. On a sheet of notes, she ascribed basic geometric shapes to each of the nine women whose stories make up Paradise —Ruby as a square, Mavis and Consolata as circles, Seneca and Divine as circles inside of squares, and so on.

At the library, I scrunched my eyes to decipher the marginalia hastily scribbled alongside her sketches of shapes. Later, on the train home, I took out my copy of Paradise , which I had brought along with me, her enigmatic shapes front of mind. I tried to develop an analysis for why each character had been given their shape, but eventually gave up. I realized that this is where Morrison’s archive could only offer more questions, not answers. Her shapes are flares from the writer’s mind that won’t let me go for a while, and I am glad for them.

Jasmine Liu is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area currently based in New York.

Featured image: Toni Morrison novels, first editions. Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photographer: Brandon Johnson, Princeton University Library.

LARB Contributor

Jasmine Liu is a writer from the Bay Area based in New York.

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Moments and Memories with Toni Morrison

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, and Ishmael Reed offer their memories of Toni Morrison.

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The Graduate Blog, Columbia College Chicago

The Site of Memory

“What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction” by Toni Morrison

“…[ T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding’.”

In Toni Morrison’s essay “ The Site of Memory ,” she says that she is trying to tell the truth, or rather that her responsibility is not to lie. She also distinguishes truth from fact. The need to expose a truth about the interior life of a person may not be based in facts—facts have no emotional memory. In truth, facts can lie. There exists a sort of liminal space between fiction and non-fiction that speaks to this idea of truth telling sans “facts.”

I feel that this is the place in which my current work lives. In my efforts to describe the nature of my recent performance project, I was at a loss for how to articulate that it was not fiction, because it was based on the lives of my maternal ancestors. Yet, it was not non-fiction, because, though I had some “facts”—some memory recollections of those who knew them and some personal memories—I also needed to fill in the blanks with creative writing in order to tell their stories. “Creative nonfiction” didn’t seem to be a complete descriptor to me, either.

Toni Morrison calls it literary archeology—“on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork, you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” The way that she steps onto this path is through the image. As a visual artist, the image has always been the lens through which I have interpreted and portrayed my personal interior life and the world around me.

I mentioned in a previous blog post , about an air  that is captured in a photograph. It is this air , which is captured in the image, that led me deeper into the stories held by these women (my ancestors), made me wish to imagine their lives, their interior lives, and made me want to tell their “truth.”

Of course, they do not speak my words, but I hope they speak through my words. I hope my words lend truth to who they were. I hope my words are a type of literary archeology of the interior lives of these women who I find remarkable. I find them remarkable for their steadfastness and their indomitable spirits—or for their absolute and resolute love and their ability to put that love in action despite the conditions of the world in which they found themselves. I hope my words remember them.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Novel — Black Humanity In Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory

Black Humanity in Toni Morrison's The Site of Memory

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Preserving and reclaiming black experiences, impact of historical trauma on black identity, the role of storytelling in preserving black culture.

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Sites of Memory: Proceedings too Terrible to Relate

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• Emilie M. Townes  

Part of the book series: Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice ((BRWT))

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In her essay “The Site of Memory” Toni Morrison explains how her work can be situated within the genre of the memoir. Her essay helps introduce several major themes of this chapter and the book as a whole: imagination, history, the fantastic, the power of images, and memory. She begins her discussion with slave narratives that, she notes, say two things: “This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but it also represents the race” and “I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery.” 1

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Robert O’Meally and Geneviève Fabre, “Introduction,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture , ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ), 5.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History: The Lectures of 1825–1826 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 ), 98.

Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays in Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion ( New York: Zone Books, 1991 ), 9–10.

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory , ed. and trans. with intro. Lewis A. Coser ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ).

Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 1995; Fortress Press, 1986 ), 151.

Barbara Christian, From the Inside Out: Afro-American Women’s Literary Tradition and the State ( Minneapolis: Center for Humanistic Studies, 1984 ), 4.

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Townes, E.M. (2006). Sites of Memory: Proceedings too Terrible to Relate. In: Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601628_2

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Toni Morrison remains the most influential theorist of the black past in contemporary letters. Since the publication of Beloved and its companion essay “The Site of Memory” in 1987, Morrison has provided the impetus and vocabulary for those wishing to claim that the past is never past but always present. Indeed, the closest thing to a prevailing method in African American literary criticism could be described as the Morrisonian imperative to read how the past haunts the present, making itself known and felt among the living in ways both explicit and subtle. The field’s current keywords—aftermath, afterlife, repetition, and return—reflect that orientation. Christina Sharpe has gone so far as to describe the object of African American criticism as “the ditto ditto in the archives of the present.” [1]

Ironically, what’s been forgotten in this canonization of the Morrison of 1987 is that she began to formulate her engagement with the black past over a decade earlier, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia. Though already a twice-published novelist, Morrison used her status as an influential editor at Random House to see the project through. The result was The Black Book : a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World, from the era of colonization, through the age of chattel slavery, and up to the waning days of Jim Crow. “Conveys” because The Black Book does not offer a textual narrative of events. Instead, it relies on pictures—that is, photographic reproductions of specific objects Morrison culled from her collaborators’ collections—to evoke what Sharpe has called the “total climate” of blacks’ experience of transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. [2] The pictures tell their own story, one that is impressionistic rather than authoritative, fragmentary rather than whole. And that is the point. Unlike books written by academic historians, which tend to ascribe a telos to narratives about the past (i.e., from slavery to freedom), Morrison envisioned her work as a “genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived.” [3] This notion of recollection—of literally re-collecting and figuratively recollecting “Black history”—is the forgotten materialist basis of what Morrison would famously term “rememory” in 1987.

Though a wide body of scholarship has been built up around Morrison, surprisingly little has been written about The Black Book . The oversight is odd since putting the volume together not only launched Morrison’s theorization of the black past but also introduced her to the source material for her best-known work. A nondescript clipping from the February 1856 issue of the American Baptist relates the story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who tried to kill her young children rather than have them grow up in bondage. Recounted by the Reverend P. S. Bassett, the episode is didactic, highlighting for a white abolitionist readership the impossible decisions enslaved people were compelled to make between freedom and survival. While this story has long been recognized as the inspiration for Beloved , only the critic Cheryl A. Wall has devoted more than passing attention to its place in The Black Book . Yet even she contends that the clipping’s significance lies in the way it prefigures Beloved ’s imperative to read the past in the present. [4] This despite the fact that the excerpt appears early in the book (page 10), when the reading experience is most disorienting, and is easily missed among two densely packed facing pages of clippings and text. Fifteen independent items—some photo-reproduced from original sources, others quoted and set in uniform type—crowd the layout. Smudges and other errors from the copying process further diminish the readability of the text. In the actual composition of The Black Book , nothing makes Garner’s story stand out, which, again, is the point: it is merely one piece of the dizzying puzzle of history.

What was distinctive about Morrison’s engagement with the black past in 1974? How might a historicist obsession with 1987 obscure what she set out to do in The Black Book ? I take a first step toward answering these questions in what follows. I propose that The Black Book advances a more contingent and discontinuous view of history than the one usually attributed to Morrison. This view, I argue, owes much to the book’s composition, which is pictorial and iconic rather than textual and discursive. By “flattening” history into a series of decontextualized images, The Black Book encourages glossing, skipping pages, reading out of order, and finding meaning only in visual or “surface” resemblances. These (non-)reading practices are further encouraged by the fact that Morrison does not discriminate when it comes to identifying things that evoke the black past. Examples of black ingenuity and perseverance appear alongside those of racial parody and animus, while handcrafted wares and mass-produced commodities vie for attention in the same span of pages, confusing the distinction between folk and market. In short, The Black Book gives one access to the black past only through an inquisitive perusal—an actual looking at things. Accordingly, its view of history is premised on an awareness that readers’ grounding in the present is far from certain. Not everyone can or will want to engage The Black Book ’s arrangement of things. What matters for Morrison, here and in her work to come, is not the fact of recovery but the question of how one re-collects the past at all.

The first thing to note about The Black Book is that it’s chock-full of text. Captions and explanatory notes appear underneath or alongside most pictures. Several types of documents—letters, certificates, applications—naturally feature handwritten or printed text. And newspaper clippings and other text-heavy ephemera take up a lot of space in the book, especially early on. Still, I would maintain that The Black Book ’s composition is essentially pictorial insofar as it decouples “understanding” the text from reading it closely. Morrison lends meaning to any given thing by how she associates it with other things—on a single page, over facing pages, or across successive pages. Think of it like reading a museum catalog: the point is to get the gist of its visual organization, not to linger over every word.

At a pictorial level, certain layouts in The Black Book give a fairly coherent impression of the meaning behind the assembled artifacts. One facing-page layout, for example, combines the following: five fugitive slave ads printed in 1790; two undated classifieds, likely from the mid-1800s; W. H. Siebert’s 1896 historical map “‘Underground’ Routes to Canada”; Samuel Rowse’s 1850 lithograph The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia ; and an 1857 letter from William Brinkl[e]y, one of Harriet Tubman’s associates in Delaware. All of these things appear under the bold heading “I rode a railroad that had no track. ” [5] True, the individual pictures are decontextualized (supporting information on the lithograph and Brinkley do not appear in The Black Book ), with only Brown’s fugitive plot given an explanatory note. Still, the layout’s overall composition conveys the resolve and resourcefulness of fugitives from slavery as they ran toward freedom, as well as the desperate efforts of white enslavers to retrieve them. Sides are drawn, sympathies are channeled, and the “goal,” Canada, is clearly delineated. In this way, Morrison’s things not only document something called the Underground Railroad; they also evoke, in the present tense, what it would have meant and felt like for an enslaved person to take flight.

Yet the coherence of this particular display is a rarity in The Black Book . Discordant juxtapositions are far more common, such that any impression of historical perspective is immediately undercut with confounding, contingent details. One page, for example, has a small photograph that shows a black woman holding a white infant in her lap. The original caption reads “Slave and Friend.” But printed next to this image are lyrics for “All the Pretty Little Horses,” and underneath both is Morrison’s clarification that the song is “an authentic slave lullaby [that] reveals the bitter feelings of Negro mothers who had to watch over their white charges while neglecting their own children.” Trying to exert a measure of control over the artifact and its description, Morrison inserts another artifact whose narrativization is supposed to guide the reader toward a “correct” reading of the image. Yet the page’s pictorial composition is irreducible to that gesture, for underneath this tableau are antebellum newspaper clippings addressing black westward expansion (one from the New York Tribune , the other from the Liberator ) and a maniculed notice prohibiting “the employment of free colored persons on water-craft navigating the rivers of [Arkansas].” [6] What these artifacts have to do with each other from a historical perspective is a mystery. But their visual organization does elicit wonderfully weird associations, as one might detect between the white baby’s hand (clasped over the black woman’s) and the indexical manicule.

This narratively incoherent but visually abundant mélange is not just a function of single-page compositions. It can be seen in facing-page layouts, as when a handwritten letter by Frederick Douglass defending his right to marry “a lady a few shades lighter in complexion than [himself]” appears directly opposite ledgers that list the human property of black enslaver John C. Stanley. It can be seen in successive pages, as is the case with the 16-page color insert, where minstrel-inspired advertising for commodities such as soap and baking powder gives way to photographs of the folk art and handiwork of enslaved people. And, perhaps most spectacularly, it can be seen on the front cover of the book itself (Figure 1): a riot of color and black-and-white images—36 in all—that practically asks (or begs) the question, What is this “black” in The Black Book ? [7]

In earlier versions of this essay, I was tempted to read such confounding pictorial juxtapositions against the grain of Morrison’s intentions for the project. I assumed she had gathered these different things to make them useful to the present, only to find that their recombination failed to do so. I now think this reading is a mistake, an imposition of the way critics historicize Morrison circa 1987 onto her earlier, far more experimental, engagement with the black past. I now believe that the contingency and discontinuity of The Black Book —in short, its refusal to make a teleological narrative available to readers—is its raison d’être . Morrison was well aware that many of the things she had gathered from collections would perplex readers. But rather than force these artifacts into a historical arc, she made their achronicity, or their out-of-timeness, a feature of the book itself. How else can one explain its strange juxtapositions? They were by design, not some unintended consequence of a historicist project.

Morrison said as much in her contemporaneous essays on the project. In them she identified at least two ways in which her work departed from academic historiography. First, it questioned the ideological limitations of historians’ primary research site: the archive. The problem with conventional histories, Morrison implied, was that they were bound to the legitimizing procedures of institutional archives. As such, histories that relied on archives would inevitably reflect the interests and concerns of the powerful, or those deemed worthy of having their effects saved for posterity. By contrast, Morrison wanted The Black Book to give voice to the masses, or “people who had always been viewed only as percentages.” To do that, she turned her attention from scholars to collectors—that is, “people who had the original raw material documenting our life: posters, letters, newspapers, advertising cards, sheet music, photographs, movie frames, books, artifacts and mementos.” Collectors Middleton “Spike” Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith were respected keepers of such “raw material,” and so they became her preferred entry point into the black past. Morrison paid her collaborators the highest compliment she could think of when she said all four possessed “an intense love for black expression and a zest wholly free of academic careerism.” [8]

The second way Morrison departs from historiography followed from the first. By operating at the margins of institutional legitimation, collectors risked being cut off from institutional recognition. It was debatable whether collectors had a legitimate claim to history at all. Doesn’t The Black Book ultimately only reflect what four collectors of varying interests and dispositions had made available to Morrison? The volume’s most outspoken critic, cultural nationalist Kalamu Ya Salaam, made a similar point when he complained, “[T]o throw all of these images and documents together without a text to explain the meaning, context and original intent does not serve to help us truely [sic] understand what our history, our real history of struggle is about.” [9] Yet Morrison would have welcomed the idea that Salaam did not glean “history,” much less a “history of struggle,” from her book. Historians, Morrison wrote, “habitually leave out life lived by everyday people”; in their writing, they seemed more concerned with “defend[ing] a new idea or destroy[ing] and old one.” [10] She wanted The Black Book to convey something messier, murkier, less institutionally recognized about the black experience in the New World. Rather than a history, she aimed to put together a work of memory.

This goal helps explain The Black Book ’s artifactual resemblance to a scrapbook. Although the print-heavy layout does suggest a catalog, the variety of pictorial forms—iconic, indexical, textual, and otherwise—makes the volume reminiscent of a collection of ephemera. This perception is lent further credence by the book’s introduction, in which none other than Bill Cosby muses:

Suppose a three-hundred-year-old black man had decided, oh, say when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook—a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles that interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters—all sorts of stuff.

“No such man kept such a book,” Cosby observes, before adding, wryly, “But it’s okay—because it’s here, anyway.” [11] As if passed down through time by a mythic ancestor, The Black Book arrives in the contemporary reader’s hands like an anonymous scrapbook. It contains remnants that are random, ephemeral, incomplete—and, precisely because of that, it comes as close as possible to documenting “Black Life as lived.” The illusion being broached here is that of ordinary remembering, or everyday recollection. A scrapbook is indifferent to the sweeps and arcs (much less teloses) of capital “H” history. All it does is keep what an amateur historian decides to set down as worthy of recalling in the moment of composition. This is why when we “read” a scrapbook, we approach it not as a bird’s-eye chronicle but as what Pierre Nora has called a “site of memory” ( lieu de mémoire ). [12]

Morrison’s commitment to ordinary remembering is so thoroughgoing that her name appears nowhere on or in The Black Book . The collectors are credited with putting the book together, but even their names are absented from the cover. This is by design, of course, as it supports the illusion that the volume is authorless, the product of a collective mythos rather than a single guiding hand. The one decidedly personal indulgence Morrison allows herself is to insert an oval-shaped, black-and-white portrait of her mother, Ramah Wofford, on the front cover and in an illustrated tableau of anonymous subjects’ portraits. [13] Nothing calls attention to her mother’s figure in either of these locations, or indeed to the fact that it is the ghost editor’s mother. Though she stares out at the reader, so do a number of the other figures among whom she is clustered. Thus, Wofford blends into the composition as just another picture in the collection. She is one memory among many.

Since 1987, critics have interpreted Morrisonian memory, or rememory, as Beloved terms it, as a charge to read the past in the present. The ethos of such criticism presumes a standpoint that can identify how contemporary circumstances are but an extension, or repetitive realization, of the past. Yet, having traced Morrison’s theorization of memory back to The Black Book , I think this is only a partially correct reading of her work. Morrison did believe in something like collective memory, a sense of the past that bound people to one another in the present. But she consistently refused an absolute knowledge of the past, one that confirms what we believe we already know (Sharpe’s ditto ditto, for example). Instead, Morrison supposed that people could access collective memory only through fragments, traces, the detritus and hauntings of history. This stuff, for Morrison, possessed its own historical weight and was not assimilable to confident determinations of the past. In making The Black Book , her intention was not to integrate readers into a discourse of “their history” but to confront them with buried memories—things in which they might not even recognize themselves. [14]

It may be fitting that, as I revised this essay for publication, The Black Book went out of and came back into print. The original 1974 edition had long been out of print, but the 2009 35th anniversary edition followed course in the late 2010s. That second disappearance turned The Black Book into something like one of the things it reproduces—a relic of the past, a memory among other memories. For a period, copies of the 2009 edition cost upwards of $150, and as much as $2,500, from online and antiquarian booksellers. Yet The Black Book ’s obsolescence was short-lived. With the passing of Morrison in 2018 there came renewed demand for her work, including this long-overlooked book.

The most recent edition (2019) is an artifact of our times. An image of the original cover, showing noticeable shelfwear, is set within a gray frame. The look approximates a well-worn family photo, as if the book itself is being memorialized. Morrison’s name appears front and top-center, her behind-the-scenes work on the project now highlighted in yellow. Yet there is one element that is ghosted from the previous editions: Bill Cosby’s introduction. The reasons for this are obvious, even though the exclusion is unannounced in the text. That the change was made at all—silently, posthumously—confirms Morrison’s intuition that history is not ditto ditto but contingent and discontinuous. Reading The Black Book today is not the same as reading it in 1974, and that is the abiding point.

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 82. Sharpe’s application of “ditto ditto” to the concept of the archive is adapted from her reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008).

[2] Sharpe, 104-5.

[3] Toni Morrison, “Behind the Making of The Black Book ,” Black World , February 1974, 89.

[4] Cheryl A. Wall, “Reading The Black Book : Between the Lines of History,” Arizona Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2012): 105-30.

[5] Middleton Harris, et al., The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974), 68-69.

[6] Ibid., 65.

[7] Ibid., 24-25, 89-104, front cover. The last part of this paragraph riffs on Stuart Hall’s field-shaping essay, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture , ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21-33.

[8] Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History,” New York Times Book Review , August 11, 1974, 16.

[9] Kalamu ya Salaam, review of The Black Book , by Middleton Harris, et al., Black Books Bulletin 3, no. 1 (1975): 73.

[10] Morrison, “Behind,” 88.

[11] Bill Cosby, “Introduction,” in The Black Book , v.

[12] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations no. 26 (1989): 7-24. The subtitle of my essay, and the distinction between history and memory I draw on here, is indebted to this piece.

[13] Harris, front cover, 196-97.

[14] This point about (non-)recognition echoes Christopher Freeburg’s analysis of The Black Book as fostering a “personalized and contingent” black interiority rather than subjecting readers to a predetermined historical script. Christopher Freeburg, Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 130.

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Thing Theory in Literary Studies

Sarah Wasserman

Patrick Moran

That things capture our imagination is hardly news. As Andrew Cole wrote in a 2016 issue of October , "materialism is as old as the hills." Cole claims that new approaches to studying things allow us to find similarities where we have too often found difference, and that this method dates back at least to Hegel and Marx. The study of matter has proceeded under a number of names: dialectical materialism, material culture studies, and, more recently, vibrant materialism, and object-oriented ontology. The scope of such studies has likewise been expansive, ranging from the sub-atomic to the galactic, from Lucretius to Latour.

Nevertheless, "thing theory," a term that loosely bundles together a range of approaches to studying material culture, began to gain critical traction in literature departments in the early 2000s. It gave many literary scholars a new way of looking at old things. For some this included tracing the material histories of objects within books (Elaine Freedgood and John Plotz) or tracing the history of the book as material object (Leah Price and Peter Stallybrass). For others, it meant pondering the ways that language and narrative reorganize subject-object relations in the minds of readers (Bill Brown and Allan Hepburn). Not simply a way of tracking the fate of snuffboxes, stamp collections, and kaleidoscopes, thing theory allowed scholars to consider what our relationships to these items reveal.

By now, thing theory may seem to name an academic trend long past, but the expansion of object studies and various post-humanisms across disciplines suggests that it remains as relevant as ever. Many of the most urgent problems of the twenty-first century reveal an entanglement between humans and things. Climate change, biotechnology, intellectual property, drought and famine, even terrorism and war can hardly be discussed without addressing such entanglement. Recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and the environmental humanities (to name just a few contemporary approaches) shares a commitment to thinking of the human subject alongside the object world. This commitment produces deeply interdisciplinary work. Reading the objects in literature and the object of literature has always involved attention to modes of production, consumption, and perception. Earlier work in thing theory and literary studies borrowed methods from anthropology, archeology, and art history; now these disciplines are borrowing back. Anthropologists such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing ( The Mushroom at the End of the World , 2015) and Kristin Peterson ( Speculative Markets , 2014), art historians like Caroline A. Jones ( The Global Work of Art , 2017) and Jennifer Roberts ( Transporting Visions , 2014) and media archeologists like Johanna Drucker ( Graphesis , 2014) and John Durham Peters ( The Marvelous Clouds , 2015) provide rigorous accounts of materiality; they also attend to the narrative, meaning-making capacities of that materiality.

This Colloquy highlights innovative work situated at the intersection of literary and material culture studies. Weaving together insights from different periods and different disciplines, the scholars whose work is presented here study the particularity of things in order to address larger concerns. Literary things can make human desires, narrative forms, historical contexts, and patterns of circulation legible. New methods and approaches may be taking shape; the thing endures. But as scholars of the Anthropocene have made clear, just how long some of our most precious objects can endure still depends upon human stewardship or disregard. Thinking about the agency of things alongside our own has raised a series of ontological concerns that cross disciplinary boundaries. But literature, which can interrogate things as they are and as they might be, has the capacity to point in new directions. Many questions animate the conversation assembled here: what does it mean to "read" an object across disciplinary perspectives?  How do literary movements (i.e. realism, postmodernism) and literary periods (i.e. Victorian, twentieth-century) stage things differently? Does thing theory entail close or surface reading: what is its relationship to post-critical methods and the descriptive turn? Can thing theory grant us access to narratives of exclusion, marginalization, and subjugation that might otherwise remain invisible? Is there an ethical or political danger in dissolving the subject-object divide? Where can the thing lead us today? What stories does it have left to tell? 

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