The Social, Political and Artistic Impact of Toni Morrison

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s contribution to literature as a writer, theoretician, social-scientist, and African American aesthetician is unparallel, and she has redefined the canon of American studies, her passing away has left an enormous void not only in African American literature, but in the world literature. She has given a voice to the prominent figures of Black power movement, including Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton, George Jackson and Angela Davis by publishing them. Among many major awards, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 and she went on to win the Nobel prize in 1993. In a 2016 interview with Nadifa Mohamed, Morrison applauded the BLM movement for the awareness that it generated. Her work never derisively attacks White American values, but she makes a case for African American ideology with such a captivating intensity that she validates the African American worldview. Her works are deeply psychoanalytic and she is also mindful of the class distinction while she is reflecting upon Black American issues concerning their self-image, the effects of cultural alienation and violence, and that of dehumanizing ideologies upon them. Moreover, she discusses these issues in the realm of African American aesthetics while using Black-American folklore, music, myths, idioms and oral history that form the backdrop of all her major literary works. The absence of Morrison is not only an immense void in the lives of the African Americans, but she is looked up as a person who spoke for the rights of the disadvantaged and discriminated minorities and marginal communities. Her novels are exemplary in adapting folktales and folk wisdom, and musical forms like blues, jazz and spirituals.