Witches in the Wilderness: Seeing Beyond the Nation-State in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Barma “Failed State.” Encyclopedia Britannica. See also Chomsky, Noam. Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Holt Paperbacks, 2006.

² Marx defines primitive accumulation as the foundational process that establishes the structural relations for the development of capital. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd edition, 2010, pp. 663–71.

³ From “Conversation: Toni Morrison,” a 1998 interview conducted by Elizabeth Farnsworth for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

⁴ The novel recounts an initial Disallowing—when Eight-Rock families were denied membership to an all-Black town in 1890 because of the relative darkness of their skin—and a less weighted Disallowing, Part Two, in 1948 when Eight-Rock soldiers find they are unwelcome home. Patricia, the novel’s and community’s historian, explains that “[e]verything anybody wanted to know about the citizens of Haven or Ruby lay in the ramifications of that one rebuff [the first Disallowing] out of many. But the ramifications of those ramifications were another story” (Paradise 198).

⁵ See Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia. 2004.

⁶ See Gauthier, Marni. “The Other Side of ‘Paradise:’ Toni Morrison’s (Un)Making of Mythic History.” African American Review, vol. 39, no. 3, 2005, pp. 395–414. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40033671.

⁷ See Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016.

⁸ The self under patriarchy is presumed male. Capitalist relations are predicated on patriarchal gender relations in order to externalize the social cost of producing labor. Thus, the capitalist is also presumed male. See Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

⁹ While subjective violence refers to violence perpetrated by a subjective perpetrator against a subjective victim, objective violence refers to the violence implicit in a society that undergirds the normal state of affairs. See Zizek, Slavoj. Violence. Picador, 2008.

¹⁰ Black settlement of the West is a haunting specter in itself. Indeed, American history is haunted by the Tulsa race massacre, the erasure of which is essential for hegemonic cultural cohesion.

¹¹ See Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Harvard UP, 1982.

¹² Frank Wilderson’s ontological meta-critique of Afro-Pessimism functions within the libidinal economy of desire opposed to the political economy. See Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black. Duke UP, 2010.

¹³ See Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 1966, pp. 151–74, www.jstor.org/stable/2711179.