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Abstract

This chapter concentrates on Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner and major voice in Black writing, who says that she sets out to write the novels which she wanted to read; novels which dealt with Black lives and Black history. Essentially dialogic, her works present many voices and perspectives which place the reader at the centre, probably of a community, able to measure versions of experiences, perceptions and representations. Her work springs, in part, from oral storytelling, using repeated motifs, circularity and variation, producing the sounds and voices of the people and concentrating on how, at different historical moments in different contexts, the strategies of representation construct, control and constrict people’s lives.

I think that all good art has always been political. None of the best writing, the best thoughts have been anything other than that.

(Morrison, 1994b, p. 3)

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© 2000 Gina Wisker

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Wisker, G. (2000). Toni Morrison. In: Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-98524-3_3

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