Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon

Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors. She argues that these “Africanist” presences are:

• The shadow that makes light possible
• The reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings
• A direct link from the Black bodies that built the nation to the characters imagined by canonical white writers

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison reveals that our liberation from diminishing notions of race comes through language. She wonders how one could speak of the foundational elements of a new nation—including labor, economy, and Christianity—without having the presence of Africans and their descendants as a central referent.

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Toni Morrison as both writer and teacher. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.