Literary Criticism

Essays examining how white American writers construct Blackness in their work and what this reveals about whiteness.

Study of Melville's Moby Dick as allegory for American totalitarianism, written while James was detained on Ellis Island.

Morrison's landmark essays examining how Black presence shaped the white American literary imagination — how canonical American authors like Poe, Cather, and Hemingway wrote about and around Blackness.

Morrison's final Harvard Norton Lectures, examining how literature constructs the 'Other' — how we narrativize race, how foreignness is produced, and how literature can counter othering.