The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise - African - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Katrine Dalsgard

Against this background, Morrison's representation of the African American use of exceptionalist discourse implies that it has a different historical meaning to blacks than to whites. Showing the many rejections suffered by the community's founding families during their original search for a home to be the primary impetus behind their founding of Haven as a separate community, she suggests that, in its origins, African American nationalism-no matter of what its hue- must necessarily be articulated on oppositional grounds. Hence, despite its European origins, the African American exceptionalist discourse she discerns is a counter-discourse that works in the service of a separate black nation. Like Glaude, she acknowledges exceptionalism's usefulness for the community's "construction of a corporate identity."

Morrison's acknowledgment of the counter-discursive function of African American exceptionalism does not lead her to embrace it, however. To be sure, as her dramatization of Ruby's story unfolds, it has close parallels to the Puritan master narrative of the nation's bringing itself to the point of apocalypse through its failure to live up to its founding ideals, and against this background, one might expect Paradise to assume the traditional form of the jeremiad, in which the writer's critical pinpointing of a discrepancy between exceptionalist ideals and practices ultimately leads her to a reinscription of the exceptionalist ideal. Particularly, Morrison's obvious signifying upon the Salem witch trials in her dramatization of Ruby's scapegoating of its women outsiders might invite a reading of her novel as a feminist jeremiad. Yet, rather than launching a feminist critique based on a call for a return to the original ideal, Morrison deconstructs the original ideal, suggesting that it is inevitably entwined with a violent marginalization of its nonexceptionalist other.

This does not imply that Morrison offers an alternative African American national ideal. In this respect, she differs from the feminist black nationalist cultural critic E. Frances White, with whom she might otherwise be fruitfully compared. Though White does not entertain the possibility of exceptionalism as an African American counter-discursive form, but writes from the traditionally Afrocentric standpoint of rooting black nationalism in Africa in her article "Africa on my Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism" (1990), she is "concerned with the way African Americans in the late twentieth century construct and reconstruct collective political memories of African culture to build a cohesive group that can shield them from racist ideology and oppression" (504). Like Morrison, in other words, White is concerned with the way African Americans are engaged in the construction of a national identity on the basis of an historical master narrative. Moreover, in further keeping with Morri son, she suggests that "the traditions revealed in nationalist discursive practices are Janus-faced- turned toward struggle with oppressive forces and contesting for dominance within black communities" (511). Particularly, in regard to the latter, "many nationalists, male and female, remain openly hostile to any feminist agenda" (506). Yet, offering her feminist critique from a basically affirmative black nationalist perspective, White implies that it is possible to redress the problems she discerns from within. She believes it possible to articulate a feminist black nationalist ideal on the basis of a feminist revision of the Afrocentric historical master narrative.