Reimagining the sense of a Black place: the struggle for survival in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I credited both the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 followed by the significant media coverage of the 100th anniversary (1 June 2021) of the Tulsa Race Massacre of the largely all-Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma as contributing factors to a new interest in all-Black towns and communities and the matter of Black lives.

2 The Black Book is a scrapbook of sorts that chronicles the history and experiences of African Americans in the United States from 1619 through the 1940s through various historical documents.

3 This opportunity was a result of the Dawes Act of 1887 which forcibly converted Native Americans’ traditional practice of land tenure which was based on stewardship to a capitalist one in which land could be bought and sold. It thereby offered formally held Native Americans’ land to development and settlement by non-indigenous people, which Morrison acknowledges both in the foreword and within the text of Paradise.

4 He founded the all-Black town of Langston, Oklahoma. According to the United States Census Bureau for 2020, Langston had a population of 1,619, with 77.88% of inhabitants being African-American.

5 This is Morrison’s acknowledgment of “the violent displacement of Native Americans from Oklahoma Territory” ([1997] 2014, xii).

6 It should be noted that some years previously, Deacon had a brief affair with Consolata, the woman that his brother Steward shoots.

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Notes on contributors

Danny Sexton

Danny Sexton is an Associate Professor English at Queensborough Community College/City University of New York. He has published on issues of race, gender, masculinity, and pedagogy as well as Victorian and African-American literature and culture. His current project, which this article is part of, is an examination of literary representation of all-Black towns and communities.