Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa
by La Vinia Delois Jennings
Professor La Vinia Jennings’s new book, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. An important contribution to scholarship in American and African American literature, the book demonstrates the centrality of traditional symbols in West African cosmology in the works of the Nobel-Prize winning novelist. Based in part on her research trips to West Africa, Haiti, South America, and the U.S., La Vinia demonstrates how Morrison’s novels employ symbols and images brought to the western hemisphere by West African slaves. An underlying argument of the book is that a collective worldview derived from West African cosmology has influenced both Morrison’s fiction and contemporary African American culture.