Possibility for an Egalitarian Imaginary in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

This study explores how Morrison’s Paradise delineates “a new space” of a possible resistance for the socially vulnerable in race and gender in terms of Butler’s concept of “an egalitarian imaginary.” The “egalitarian imaginary” seeks to achieve equal conditions of livability and grievablity, essential tothe determination of social equality. Both livability and grievability are the fundamental conditions to build social bonds grounded on interdependency and practice the force of nonviolence against the structural and physical violence. In Paradise the two communities, Ruby and the Convent, are the social abjects who search for a possible home to guarantee freedom and safety. Ruby, the black-only community, desires to fortify their “Paradise” based on reversed hierarchy of skin color and exclusion only to reveal that they are to justify structural violence. On the contrary, the Convent, though it was a mere group of social outcasts at first, emerges to an open space which enables the women to build social bonds by sharing their past trauma, searching for a possibility of livable lives, and claiming equal grievability on their deaths. Paradise presents the force of nonviolence derived from social bonds based on human interdependency that insists the equal claim to livable and grievable lives, thereby suggesting an unrealistic yet manageable vision of “an egalitarian imaginary.”