Toni Morrison's A Mercy in Hungary : Racialized Discourse in the Classroom

Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia (2022) Toni Morrison's A Mercy in Hungary : Racialized Discourse in the Classroom. In: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, Cham, pp. 15-30. ISBN 9783030941659; 9783030941666

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Abstract

At the intersection of history and language, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison has sought to map a new territory of literary representations of race in American life. Her work provides a critique of the use of racialized language and fictive representations of an unknown, privately painful history of slavery, focusing on African American women who need to forge themselves new kinds of racial identities as they face social pressures at different times in U.S. history. Kovács contextualizes the themes of Morrison’s work as presented in a university classroom setting in Hungary and explores Morrison’s representation of history, language, and black women’s agency in her 2008 novel A Mercy. Kovács traces ways Morrison’s project of remapping representations of race has been transformed through the figure of its black female protagonist Florens, who tries to write herself out of slavery but ends up alone and mad, her community of women unable to help her. The chapter also explores students’ reactions to this fictional history of the invention of slavery and racial prejudice in colonial America and how students engage with literary criticism that examines racialized language depicting the failure of women’s agency.

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