Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom

by Lawrie Balfour

When Toni Morrison declares that she “can't wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work,” she raises an issue at the heart of modern political How should we understand freedom? And what does freedom mean in the shadow of racial slavery and colonialism? In this study of Toni Morrison's writing, Lawrie Balfour explores Morrison's reflections on the idea of freedom in her novels and nonfiction. While Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her political thought has yet to receive the same attention. Balfour shows how Morrison's writing illuminates the meanings of freedom and unfreedom in a democratic society founded on both the defense of liberty and the right to enslavement.

Morrison's fiction and meditations on the power of language challenge wishful notions of color-blindness and complaints that it is time to move beyond thinking and talking about race. Her attentiveness to the experiences of people “no one inquired of”--especially her interest in the lives of black women and girls--reorients democratic study toward racial slavery, settler colonialism, and the ongoing processes of theft and domination instituted by these practices. Morrison's writings kindle new forms of freedom-seeking that do not rely on the subjugation of others.

240 pages, Hardcover

Published February 10, 2023

About the author

Lawrie Balfour teaches political theory and American studies at the University of Virginia. The author of Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (2011) and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (2001), she has published numerous articles and book chapters of race, gender, literature, and democracy. Currently she is working on two projects: one on reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and their legacies; and another on the meanings of freedom in Toni Morrison's novels and essays. She also serves as editor of Political Theory.