Black women’s complicated laughter and Toni Morrison’s post-migration novels

Abstract

ABSTRACT Toni Morrison is not conventionally viewed as a humourist or comic novelist; her chosen subject-matter has inevitably led critics to explore the bleak, tragic and painful dimensions of her writing.Her deployment of both comic anger and of the absurd dimensions of black American history, however, has yet to be properly recognised. This article does not seek to demonstrate Morrison’s place within the tradition of African American women’s politicised humour, however rightful and obscured that place may be. My analysis here instead builds on the general idea that black humour has serious concerns to examine one very specific phenomenon: that of Morrison as a theorist of laughter. In an unprecedented reading, I argue that Morrison’s fiction contains within it a sustained and sophisticated consideration of the act of laughter, the sound of laughter, the look of laughter, and the power of laughter. I am interested in the aesthetic and political dimensions of Morrison’s representation of laugher itself – in her descriptions of not just why but how characters laugh, and of her detailed attention to the variously transformative effects of the act of laughing. Acknowledging this author’s preoccupation with the seriousness of laughter is key to understanding her work, her position within twentieth/twenty-first century black American cultural production, and the complex nature of her intellectual legacy. After tracing a neglected genealogy of black women’s laughter through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, my exploration focuses on the three ‘post-migration novels’.