First, read Toni Morrison’s “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (pp. 1067 – 1070). After reading Morrison’s text, read he following article by Carole Stewart (“Remembering Toni Morrison” and consider the following passage:
According to Carole Lynn Stewart in “Remembering Toni Morrison,” ‘Morrison was [. . . ] a cultural critic who profoundly affected the way many of us teach American literature, and especially nineteenth-century American literature” (2). Her cultural critiques of Poe, Melville, and Twain loom large in the reshaping of the American canon. The reorientation of the literary tradition occurred in her early discussion of “classic” white American fiction in the nineteenth century in Playing in the Dark, which had never imagined a reader as anything else but white, while the black characters, the presence of millions of African enslaved persons for hundreds of years, haunt the American Republic, and came to shape the very fabric of its national literature and culture. “The contemplation of this black presence,” she wrote, “is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (“Rootedness” 5). Indeed, as she further remarked, “nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery” (38). While Toni Morrison’s major achievements are often placed in her fiction, she equally provoked American cultural critics and historians to view the presence of Africans and the institution of slavery as central to the creation of their prized democratic foundations” (Stewart 2).
- What is the author’s of this article saying?
- What is the author’s (Stewart’s) view of Morrison’s impact on American (particularly African American) literature?
- Why does Toni Morrison believe that the “ancestor figure” so important to African American literature?
