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“... for the now proscribed term ‘race’, more simply lost interest in the issue. Vitalis, quoting Toni Morrison, calls this turn away from race ‘the graceful, even generous, liberal gesture’, and not with admiration. Its effects were profound. With race no longer a master category, American race relations no longer figured as part of a global ...”

“... ground or a place of poise: it is no man’s land, and it is a place that black women writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou seem to have understood better than anyone. They were at Baldwin’s funeral in New York when the white world had forgotten him and black militants were only just beginning to remember who he was. ‘Perhaps ...”

“... which was most clearly manifested during Monicagate. Hitchens ridicules the claim made by Toni Morrison and endorsed by Arthur Miller that because Clinton came from a broken home and had an alcoholic mother, he suffered from the same prejudices as those directed at blacks, and thus in some sense is ‘our first black President’. He knows that ...”

“... decorated with (trademarked) Levine cartoons of Stephen King, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison or John Updike (gender and ethnic propriety are carefully observed). What is most dispiriting about these Barnes and Noble stores is the expansive blandness of their produce, and the prominence given bestsellers and non-books ...”

“... Pasolini’s film (1969), Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s production (2001), and among writers, Toni Morrison, who slants the myth through her novel Beloved (1987), as does Marina Carr more directly in her play By the Bog of Cats (1998), which is set in a traveller community in Ireland. Rachel Cusk’s take on Euripides’ Medea, commissioned for the ...”

“... were lost. But another of the historian’s responsibilities is to confront us with the absences. Toni Morrison has described her reluctance to represent the abjection of the middle passage: Beloved, she says, stands in for ‘those black slaves whom we don’t know . . . I had to be dragged, I suppose by them, kicking and screaming into this ...”

“... guises and moods, one can hear the KJB resonating in the work of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison. One of the most interesting and perceptive essayists is R.S. Sugirtharajah, even though his postcolonial scrutiny of the KJB takes surprisingly bitter sideswipes at a rather good recent history of 1611 by Adam Nicolson. Sugirtharajah ...”

“... critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z tweeted to his millions of followers: ‘Please. read.’ For some time now, Coates has been writing in what he and the avid readers of his blog (whom he ...”

“... universality of a literary modernism which has come in our time to stand for Literature itself (Toni Morrison becomes the exhibit here, whose Beloved McGurl ingeniously converts into a kind of schoolroom drama). But now the universalism of these multicultures is rather startlingly contrasted to a ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (I would have ...”

“... for Clinton was about to become not just any white Negro but ‘our first black President’, as Toni Morrison has called him, with black Americans supplying ‘the dowry’ of transgression, punishment and forgiveness for sexual misbehaviour. (Andrew Johnson, the only other impeached President, was brought to the bar because he opposed the 14th ...”

“... other in public – the focus of efforts to destroy them; perhaps it was with King in mind that Toni Morrison declared Clinton to be our first black President. Believing that a profane King can speak to contemporary black youth as a holy one cannot, Dyson devotes whole chapters to his hero’s sexual life and shows a great interest in the plagiarism ...”

“... to his distancing of himself from his fellow blacks.’ This echoes a private communication by Toni Morrison to Rampersad, which the biographer reproduces at length; Morrison’s judgment on Ellison builds up to a damning charge: ‘One contrasts the largeness of Invisible Man with its broad canvas and its wide ...”

“... for food and sex as a blot on the whiteness of the White House, but by supporters such as Toni Morrison who said, along with the Congressional Black Caucus, that ‘white skin notwithstanding, this is our first Black president.’ In some ingenious sense, the media framed the affair as a ‘modern-day Rape of Lucrece’. Bailey’s account of ...”

“... and groans, and Cootie’s muffled ‘Why?’ speak African-American volumes – the ones that Toni Morrison, among others, is striving to write. But the shortcomings of Ellington’s verbal narratives for My People and the Second Sacred Concert (1968) demonstrate that his instincts were sounder in 1928, and that bigger is not necessarily better. The ...”