Marijana Mikić and Derek C. Maus have published an article entitled “’Only white folks got the freedom to hate home’: Strategic Empathy and Expanded Intersectionality since Morrison’s Home” in the Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, edited by. Linda Wagner-Martin and Kelly Reames, published by Bloomsbury Press.
In her 1997 essay “Home,” Toni Morrison poses several fundamental questions that guide her literary work: “How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? ” (5) . These questions are integral to Morrison’s own work, but she also entreats other authors to respond to them; a substantial number, including Brit Bennett, Bryan Washington, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Akwaeke Emezi, have done so. Like Morrison, these younger authors construct storyworlds that both depict and challenge the use of such social emotions as guilt and shame in constituting and perpetuating the arbitrary in- and out-group divisions that are fundamental to racial and spatial forms of constraint. In doing so, they show how resisting oppression provides Black characters, especially Black women, with important possibilities for community-building/home-creation.
