Philip Page – författare

The novels of Toni Morrison depict a disjointed culture striving to coalesce in a racialized society. No other contemporary writer conveys this “double consciousness” of African American life so faithfully. As her characters struggle to negotiate meaningful roles and identities, and as they confront the inescapable issue of division, her novels are permeated with motifs of fragmentation. This divided entity is a theme repeated throughout Morrison's fiction. Operating on many levels, this plurality-in-unity affects narrators, chronologies, individuals, couples, families, neighborhoods, races. Philip Page's critical interpretation of Morrison's first six novels―Sula, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Jazz, and Tar Baby―places her fiction in the forefront of American culture, African American culture and contemporary thought. Her fiction has the power to expand the souls of all readers by taking them into the recesses of other souls-in-process, by requiring them to work the traumas and dilemmas those other souls endure, and by challenging them to know, accept, and keep open their own dangerous freedom.

As a reaction against persistent black exclusion from white American society, the novels of recent African American writers boldly celebrate the heritage of black culture. They acclaim a people once dispersed by racism and humiliation but now restoring its legacy of rich community life.For close examination of this theme Philip Page brings together five novelists who are in the forefront of contemporary fiction and shows how their voices combine for an ongoing dialogue on the importance of community to the African American world.Gaining its special force through addressing national concerns and through never backing away from the truth in the face of stubborn opposition, the fiction of Gaines, Naylor, Johnson, Cade-Bambara, and Wideman contributes to postmodernist debates on race, the repressed past, and the contemporary American conscience.