To Make a Diasporic Heterotopia: A Comparative Reading of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

Abstract

This paper attempts to apply a theoretical concept of heterotopia to the literary texts written by two contemporary African-American female novelists, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. For this purpose, I comb through space theory first, focusing on the political economy of space which views the history of space in sync with a cycle of the formation, establishment, decline, and dissolution of a community that populates it. I am particularly concerned in this process with the cultural ramification of a space, which I see as the birth of heterotopia. What makes a black community in the circum-Atlantic world a durable heterotopia is some agents’ will to culture in their border-crossing diaspora. Dealing with the inseparability of the politics of location and the politics of identity, Morrison’s and Naylor’s complex characterization of such agents defies the reader who is tempted to dismiss African-American literary discourse as an essentialized one of the cultural nationalism. Both Morrison’s Tar Baby and Naylor’s Mama Day are situated in an imagined island outside the national borders or interests of the United States: the former is set in a fictional island named Isle des Chevaliers, which can be located somewhere around Dominica in the Caribbean, and the latter is set in a fictitious island called Willow Springs, which may be located in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Against these uncanny backdrops, Morrison and Naylor reveal the various ways in which people recognize, unrecognize, or misrecognize the meaning of space. To concern myself with the relationship between the heterotopic places and the diasporic agents is at once to dredge up the deep history of the black diaspora in the transatlantic world and to offer a solution to the unfinished question of U.S. race relations. This paper’s call for the recognition of the diasporic heterotopia in Tar Baby and Mama Day ultimately engages with the due attention to the subjectivity of marginalized people who are forgotten at ever accelerating speed in the age of globalization.