Sula

emphasis on her protruding posterior as a metaphor for the exploitation of black bodies and that the past cannot be left behind us. “Why the focus on the “black bottom”? Like Toni Morrison, who makes this physical image into a geographic metaphor in Sula—and like August Wilson, who uses it in his play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1979) to foreground the exploitation of a black blues singer—Parks is interested in contemporary reverberations of the historical depiction and appropriation of the “black…

Predictability in Toni Morrison’s novels Critics have noted that characters in Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novels are predictable with some type of southern connection that depicts African-American life at various time periods in history. Her novels often raise questions about race, gender, and address issues that are significant to contemporary readers. For millions of African Americans, the south was called home until the massive migration to the north. However, for many, including…