Price: $34.95
Page Count: 286
Publication Date: July 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77258-104-1
“The essays in Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood explore Morrison’s complex and nuanced treatment of mothering. The collection strongly enriches the scholarship on Morrison Studies, providing original insights into her earlier work and, importantly, illuminating her recent novels, such as
Home and God Help the Child.”
—ANISSA JANINE WARDI, Professor of English, Chatham University, author of Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective
“This collection on Toni Morrison’s oeuvre reshapes definitions of mothering in her novels and expands our working knowledge of families under intersectional pressures, both in the works and in the world. Fans and critics of Morrison, as well as motherhood and family scholars, particularly those interested in the practice of othermothering, will find this book enlightening. Explored are non-normative ‘mothers,’ oppressions that enable the conditions of ‘bad’ mothering, and the effects of absent/poor mothering on children. These essays are essential reading for those interested in mothering and Morrison.”
—NICOLE L. WILLEY, Professor of English, Kent State University Tuscarawas
Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Martha Satz and Lee Baxter
PART I: “OTHERMOTHERING”
Masculine Othermothering in Toni Morrison’s Home
Susan Neal Mayberry
“Not a Maternal Drudge … Nor … An Acid-Tongued Shrew”:
The Complexity of Ruth and Pilate in
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Jill Goad
“You’ve Already Got What You Need, Sugar”:
Southern and Maternal Identity
in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Anna Hinton
PART II: “BAD” MOTHERING
Studies in M(othering):
Unpacking the “Wicked Thing” in Toni Morrison’s
A Mercy and Beloved
Veena Deo
Rethinking, Rewriting Self and Other
in Toni Morrison’s Love
Lee Baxter
The Trauma of Second Birth:
Double Consciousness, Rupture, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Lauren A. Mitchell
“Are You Sure She Was Your Sister?”
Sororal Love and Maternal Failure in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Kristin M. Distel
From Sweetness to Toya Graham:
Intersectionality and the (Im)Possibilities of Maternal Ethics
Jesse A. Goldberg
Racialized Intimacies and Alternative Kinship Relations:
Toni Morrison’s Home
Rosanne Kennedy
PART III: LACK OF MOTHERING
Failed Mothers and the Black Girl-Child Victim of Incestuous
Rape in The Bluest Eye and Push
Candice Pipes
Mothering Oneself in Sula
Marth Satz
Black Motherhood, Beauty, and Soul Murder-Wound
Althea Tait
“They Took My Milk”:
The Multiple Meanings of Breastmilk in
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Barbara Mattar
Brother-Mother and Othermothers:
Healing the Body of Physical, Psychological, and Emotional
Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Home
Tosha K. Sampson-Choma
About the Contributors
Lee Baxter is an independent scholar with her M.A. in Gender Studies and a Ph.D. (A.B.D) in Gothic and Horror Literature and Film Studies. Broadly, her research concerns the representation of wounded bodies and psyches in literature and film.
Martha Satz, Assistant Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in humanities and an A.B.D. in philosophy from Brown University. She has published widely on such diverse topics as Jane Austen, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, children’s literature, and genetics and the disability community. She teaches courses on minority literature, African- American women writers, and African-American literature. The adoptive mother of two bi-racial children (African American and white), now adults, she has written frequently about this experience.
