A Black and White Ecology

Abstract

The concluding chapter of the book considers the ways in which Morrison, in turning her attention to the colonies in A Mercy, examines the artifice of race and lays bare the myriad ways in which racial categorization was foundational to the building of America. Moreover, in Jazz, Morrison gestures to the plantation economy through references to Joe and Violet’s cotton farming. This monocropping was detrimental to the physical and social landscape of the nation. In recognition of the bankruptcy of a black and white ecology, the conclusion theorizes the rainbow, a trope in Morrison’s canon that complicates binaristic thinking. Morrison’s characters inhabit polychromatic worlds; their ecological relationships are multifaceted and contradictory, marked by a complex interweaving of beauty and grief.