Teaching African American Women’s Literature in Australia: Reading Toni Morrison in the Deep North

Abstract

This chapter discusses reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), a novel set in the United States in 1941, in courses at the University of Queensland (the earliest, largest, and most privileged, in a state that has been both redneck and Red North) in Australia’s Deep North.¹ I will discuss reading African American women’s writing here in relation to two principal concerns: teaching Black writing in the Australian academy in a historical context of usually unstated preferences for dead white men’s literature, and in relation to reading Black Australian women’s writing. With regard to the former, I want to situate the difficulties of adding Black women writers (African American or Australian) to the canon — or alternative canons — in the light of the racism that has flooded and continues to flood the social, economic, and political history of both the United States and Australia. Some of the issues that arise are: the relationship of teaching literature dealing with issues of race and gender politics to the society in which it is written and read; political interaction and interchange — especially since the 1960s — between activists, writers, and academics in Australia and the United States which have impacted considerably upon cultural politics and teaching in the universities; the expectation of the production of “truth effects” in reading Black narratives, or the expectation on the part of white readers that such writing will “educate” them and / or articulate a lost or silenced history; and the ways in which teaching of African American women’s writing (and notably Morrison) can most usefully be approached in Australia now.