Toni Morrison: Kinesthetics and Kinship creates a generative and transdisciplinary space for graduate students and faculty to study and celebrate Toni Morrison’s incredible oeuvre. Reading some of Morrison’s most well-known texts, such as Beloved, Sula, and Song of Solomon alongside Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, this reading group seeks to situate Morrison’s work within a greater Black literary, artistic, and filmic history. Morrison’s works have proved essential reading for those working across the humanities, inspiring a generation of scholars and creatives. Exploring kinesthetics and kinship as two points of entry into Morrison’s work, this reading group urges participants to examine alternative forms of knowledge production. 

Toni Morrison: Kinesthetics and Kinship continues other campus initiatives to honor Morrison’s legacy and her particular contributions to Princeton University, including the recent symposium and the exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory at the Firestone Library. Morrison’s writing is recognized for its significant contributions to African American Studies and American Literature, but has also proven fruitful in the fields of Art History, Women & Gender Studies, Environmental Studies, Sociology, Religion, and American Studies. Though Morrison’s works have been read and loved by millions around the world, her novels have also been the repeated target of book bans, which only emphasizes the need to continue to read Morrison’s work with more breadth and depth.

Dividing her oeuvre and the accompanying readings and films into two sections, participants will read Morrison’s work through the lens of kinesthetics in the fall and through the lens of kinship in the spring. The exploration of kinesthetics provides a closer look of how Morrison’s characters learn about life and their world through the movement of their bodies. We also investigate the characteristics and boundaries of kinship, in both biological and cultural forms, to gain insight into belonging, community, and diaspora. To further hone the month’s conversation of a text, each reading has also been assigned a theme which will be read alongside the semester’s broader frameworks of kinesthetics or kinship. While the list of readings incorporates some of Morrison’s most read books, we will also attend to her lesser read works Paradise and Recatatif.

Fall Schedule: 

• September 11 - Toni Morrison, Beloved
• October 10- Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
• November 13 - Toni Morrison, Jazz
• December 11 - Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991 film)