Recent theoretical discussions of transparency frequently center on questions relating to technical and digital surveillance, such as the phenomenon of Wikileaks (Boothroyd 2011), the sharing of selfies (Metelmann and Telios 2018), and Edward Snowden’s revelations of the United States National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of digital data (Birchall 2015). The discussion has indeed become increasingly urgent owing to digital and technical developments. When it comes to theorizing transparency, however, an overly strong emphasis on such developments involves a risk of presentism. Yet, questions relating to transparency in communities are not new, nor are they necessarily dependent on digital systems.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison is a rich collection of critical essays discussing the acclaimed African American author’s oeuvre and the first to appear after Morrison’s passing in August 2019. The volume, divided into three parts, includes thoughtful analyses of Morrison’s novels, insightful explorations of how her texts relate to our contemporary world, and useful discussions of her texts in pedagogical contexts. Furthermore, Morrison’s critical writings are discussed in many of the essays in the volume, albeit not in a separate section. The individual essays are generally strong contributions to Morrison criticism; here, unfortunately, I can only mention a few of the 25 essays included in the book.

This dissertation explores the writing of place in Toni Morrison’s fiction, focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1998), and A Mercy (2008). It analyses particular instances of written places in these works in a twofold way, namely, how place is foregrounded through literary means in the text and how place has emerged in a process of shaping. Through an exploration of the conjunction of text and avant-texte, that is, of published texts as well as manuscripts, in an analysis combining close reading and genetic criticism, the study investigates how certain moments of place are shaped in processes of writing and presented in the published version of the text. Drawing on archival material in the Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton University Library and exploring the literary foregrounding of place both in its genesis and in its published textual form, the study supplements previous research and gives new insights into Morrison’s writing of place. The investigation is carried out in four chapters, of which the first presents a selective overview of place in Morrison’s oeuvre, giving an outline of the geographical locations of her main fictional places as well as insights into the writing of some placial moments in her fiction. This is followed by three in-depth analyses, focusing on the three selected novels. The analysis of Beloved shows that the idea of joining that runs through the text is placial; moreover, drafts indicate that this idea was planned to conclude the novel, thus emphasising it as a central textual feature of the novel. The study of Paradise suggests that places in the novel both stem from and present processes of transformation. This is underscored by textual features such as contrasts, paradoxical images, and by the inclusion of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé as a transformational force. The chapter on A Mercy engages with how place is foregrounded through the characters’ placial relations and through literary allusion. Florens’s writing on the walls and the floor of Jacob Vaark’s third house forms the house into a place of articulation in its dual sense of joining and expression. Manuscripts indicate an increasing emphasis in the writing process on the house as the site of inscription and a shift in intertextual resonances from the canonical male author William Faulkner to the first published African American woman Phillis Wheatley. Through these analyses, the study seeks to demonstrate the manifold ways in which Toni Morrison shapes her fictional places into meaningful literary elements.

Experience of place plays a crucial role in Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby. When we first meet the character Son, he is working his way through the waves in an attempt at reaching the island Isle des Chevaliers. Features of the natural world, such as the trees, the river, and the clouds, perceive the brutal transformation of a place they once thought was permanently pristine. Jadine gets stuck in the swamp, desperately struggling against the swamp women trying to drag her down in the quicksand. And Son, finally, becomes part of the mythology of the island as he joins the riding chevaliers.

Less frequently noticed in analyses of Tar Baby is the role of places that are, in one way or another, absent. Often, these places appear in tensions where characters’ immediate experiences of place are contrasted with places never appearing as concretely present, but rather as conceptions of geographically remote places.

The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which absent places are suggested and presented in conjunction with and in contrast to concrete, present places. It is, I believe, on the borderline between the present and the absent that the significance of place in the novel can be discerned.

Critical studies of Toni Morrison’s fiction, quite understandably, tend to favour explorations from the perspectives of, e.g., race, African American Culture, and history of slavery as well as narratological and stylistic investigations. What these approaches lack, however, is a way of accounting forthe world as experienced. A phenomenological method, on the other hand, has the potential to elucidate precisely this. This paper, therefore, suggests a phenomenological reading of Morrison, inspired by Edmund Husserl’s notion of the epoché; my focus will be on textual layers that are not reducible to issues of ‘the natural attitude,’ such as external theories or representational interpretations. Instead of imposing specifictheoretical frameworks on the text, I will adopt a procedure of letting the text ‘speak for itself.’ The paper focuses on the novelA Mercy, which is perhaps the Morrison text that most obviously presents interrelations between the human being and the natural world. Taking a phenomenological understanding ofplaceas a starting point, I will explore tensions between various modes of placial relations, most notably attitudes of mastering of place, bonding with place, and receptivity to place. At first glance, the protagonist, Florens, seems to remain homeless and placeless, lacking a fundamental bond with concrete place. However, a phenomenological analysis, together with a phenomenological understanding of place, uncover a development in the protagonist from an initial lack of a bond with place to an incipient receptive, pre-reflective openness to place as well as an emerging sense of bonding with place by way of body. I will argue that Florens’s attitude to place stands in contrast to and presents an alternative to the attitude of mastering of place presented by the male European characters. Moreover, in line with Edward S. Casey’s view of a bond with the earth as tied to ethics, I will discuss Florens’s attitude as holding a possibility of ecological responsibility. With bell hooks, a bond with place can also be seen as rendering possible a resistance to attitudes of dominion. Thus, I will suggest that ultimately, the protagonist’s attitude to place implies ethical dimensions.