Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from
ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has,
from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that
address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the
transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni
Morrison's work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An
Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of
the Nobel Laureate's novels and brings to the fore an unequaled
engagement between race and nature.
Morrison's ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are
enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the
branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their
environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships
and interactions between individuals and community, and between
organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They
highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of
interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is
organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and
Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home;
bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula
and God Help the Child.
By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and
the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of
environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.
