Got on My Traveling Shoes: Migration,Exile,and Home in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Abstract

“Got on My Traveling Shoes” examines Toni Morrison’s (2008) A Mercy in terms of its engagement with tropes of migration, exile, and home. This article builds upon the scholarship of critics such as Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Carol Boyce Davies, bell hooks, and Morrison herself in arguing that the author’s latest novel refigures the essentialist model of double-consciousness reified in W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and gestures toward a liminal home existing outside fixed cultural bounds. The article’s unique contribution to the transnational studies conversation centers on the analysis of Morrison’s re-inscription of the moment of race consciousness. Through an inventive use of language, Morrison not only disrupts the fixed historiography underlying figurations of the American Empire, she also creates a new, hybrid personal whose complex subjectivity defies reductive attempts at racial categorization. A Mercy therefore mediates against simplistic genealogical notions embedded in “DuBoisian” ways of perception, even as it lays the groundwork for a more nuanced reading of American history.

Keywords

double consciousness matrixial borderspace tropes of home the Black Atlantic

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