Settler colonial coexistence? Haxel Gedikli, ‘The Condition for Coexisting: Settler Colonialism and Tony Morrison’s Mercy’, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, 11, 2021, pp. 62-91 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial coexistence? Haxel Gedikli, ‘The Condition for Coexisting: Settler Colonialism and Tony Morrison’s Mercy’, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, 11, 2021, pp. 62-91

18Dec21

Excerpt: Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy has been mostly noted in scholarly circles for creating a multicultural, multiethnic American origins narrative and its representation of American slavery prior to slavery’s conjunction with racism. Nonetheless, current readings of the novel fail to pay attention to the author’s concern with the settler colonial condition and its gendered logic of dispossession in this atypical Morrisonian narrative: While Morrison travels to late seventeenth-century America to entertain what it means to be a female slave without being racialized, she zeroes in on the condition of being dispossessed and the violence of being disconnected from one’s origins.

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