Reconstructing the Gendered and Racialized Geography in Morrison’s A Mercy-A Geocritical Reading

Abstract

Instead of reading Toni Morrison’s A Mercy as an American origins narrative, this article contends that this novel can be understood as a Black feminist geographical text in which its protagonists reconstruct the gendered and racialized geographies through processes of real-and-imaginative re-spatialization. Drawing upon feminist geographies, primarily Katherine McKittrick’s insights on Black feminist geography in Demonic Grounds, we examined how geographies of domination delimit the formation of characters’ identity and subjectivity, and how their respatializing the colonial house produces alternative spatial imaginaries. In doing so, the present article demonstrates that in the face of geographical domination—one that positions African Americans as “out of place” or “in places,”—Black women writers unsettle colonial spatial logics and forge more liberated forms of identity. In foregrounding such creative, imaginative, and embodied spatial strategies, we reveal Morrison’s sustained engagement with a Black feminist geographical tradition and highlight the centrality of Black feminist geographical thinking to reimagining space, subjectivity, and freedom.