Re-imagining agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Magali Cornier Michael

Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) seeks to re-imagine agency as a function of coalition processes that are communal and caring in impulse. In so doing, Paradise addresses issues of coalition in ways that complicate and finally gesture away from dominant conceptualizations of coalition in the United States in the wake of the Civil Rights and New Left Movements. Although both of these movements championed coalition politics, commonly understood as the combining of "human and material resources to effect a specific change" that cannot be brought about "independently" (Brown 3), as a means of achieving equality, they operated on models of coalition that in the end retained hierarchy, retained the notion of a centered, stable subject that was male and gained dominance through processes of othering. (1)

That the prevailing conception of coalition politics has been masculinized is evident not only in its various enactments within the abovementioned activist movements but also in the ways in which coalition itself has been theorized in the West. Since the early 1960s, the disciplines of history, economics, political science, and psychology in the West have tended to discuss and theorize coalition in terms that privilege mathematical and market models and that unquestioningly assume maximizing power and winning as the goals of coalition building. For example, William H. Piker's groundbreaking The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), which is cited in almost all texts that succeed it, privileges "abstract reasoning" as the mechanism by which "political science" can "rise above the level of wisdom literature" and "join economics and psychology in the creation of genuine sciences of human behavior" (viii), and he constructs a model of coalition-building that assumes that "rational man wants... to win," "to maxim ize power" (21-22). Consequently, the dominant versions of coalition processes privilege an individualistic and agonistic model, complete with hierarchy and exploitation, and both devalue and efface other modes of coalition. R. Radhakrishnan is one of the few scholars who has argued that there exists a need "for the creation of non-aggressive, non-coercive, and generous space where different and multiple constituencies may meet collectively" (323). Although the work of W. Edward Vinacke, in the area of psychology, describes the differing behaviors of men ("exploitative") and women ("accommodative") when placed in controlled experimental situations that necessitate coalition-building, he does not analyze the consequences of his findings for existing models of coalition that have tended to privilege those behaviors associated with men ("Accommodative" 511). (2) While Jerome Chertkoff notes Vinacke's findings, he argues that "these sex differences are not terribly damaging to the existing theories" (314), thus d emonstrating the widespread tendency to foreclose on any exploration of coalition that revises established, dominant, male-centered notions of coalition.

In contrast, Morrison's Paradise explores coalition processes that are more accommodative, caring, and loving, rather than exploitative, and that are aimed principally at survival and at moving toward a new, alternative form of non-hierarchical justice, rather than at maximizing power and winning. Such a reformulation of coalition necessarily entails a particular conception of justice, as articulated within recent discussions of justice that have emphasized how "justice is inseparable from social practices" and thus "cannot be examined a historically, for it changes in relation to changes in power" (Garth 1, 11); how "it is artificial and inappropriate to separate the concept of justice from that of power or ideology" (Fineman 81); and how "conceptions of justice are historical constructions" and thus "power is implicated in the construction of justice" (Eurick 37). All of these conceptualizations of justice share an understanding that justice is both fluid and socially constructed and that any claims to univ ersality must be understood as "perspectival universality," in the sense that "society provides the perspective from which justice is done" and from which "'principles of justice' are formulated" (Fisk 227-28). Moreover, if justice is understood as inseparable from its socio-historical context, then by extension injustice is also a function of socio-historical context; indeed, justice "is framed by the claim of injustice" within a particular historical context (Hartog 167). For example, given the centrality of the notion of individualism in the West at least since the Enlightenment, Western notions of justice are arguably heavily individualistic and, most often, take the form of a rhetoric of equal rights. Furthermore, the notion of equal rights is difficult to sever from its association with white men, as a result of the ongoing battles in Western "democracies" to claim equal rights for women and non-whites. As Fred Dallmayr asserts, "From the beginning, individualism carried overtones of segregation and wil lful arrogance" and "a domineering impulse," especially "human mastery" over "nature" and "the powerless" (9). Inevitably, then, conceptualizations of justice in the West remain inseparable from historically specific, inequitable power relations. My claim is that the relationship between justice and social practices is a central concern of Morrison's Paradise, both in its critique of dominant modes of justice and social practices and in its sketching of a reconceptualized form of justice based on more caring, accommodative social practices.