Portrait of the postcolonial intellectual as a wise old woman: Toni Morrison, word-work, and The Foreigner’s Home

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Foreigner’s Home is a documentary film that is grounded in footage shot at the Louvre in November 2006, when the African American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was guest-curator at the famous Parisian museum. It experiments with form to further public dialogue about citizenship, belonging, the legacies of slavery, and the power of art, articulating interviews, archival film footage, animation, and music in a homage to and amplification of Morrison’s intellectual and artistic vision. In this article, I discuss the documentary’s cinematic representation of Toni Morrison as a postcolonial intellectual, exploring its treatment of her as object of filmmaking, and inquiring into the ways in which this contributes to revisiting notions of aesthetic engagement and political intervention into the public sphere. Analyzing the film and bringing it in dialogue with other texts by and about Morrison, I examine the ways in which the documentary weaves and modulates the notion of the public intellectual Morrison represents. Dialogue, I argue, stands at the heart of this vision. Therefore, I especially attend to the dialogues the film stages, not only between people but also between texts, media, artworks, and artforms.