“In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (53)

Although not referenced directly, I could not help thinking of Audre Lorde's “Uses of the Erotic” while reading Jean Wyatt's Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, a book of insightful literary criticism that reads Toni Morrison's narrative choices as a set of ethics in relation to the concept of love—or, as Lorde might put it, a politics of the erotic. Wyatt's book interweaves close readings of Morrison's narrative style with arguments about race, gender, power, narrative form, psychoanalysis, authorial ethics, contemporary modes of accessing the traumas of US slavery, reader responsibility, and Morrison's personal growth as a widely influential writer and thinker. Following Wyatt's lead, we might...

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