The structuring of Morrison’s novel reflects this sense of being “held together” in abandonment, a kind of belonging by way of unbelonging. Without titles or numbers, A Mercy’s chapters are unlabeled, making the reader responsible for inferring a logic of coherence onto the narrative while reading. On the first page, the protagonist, Florens, asks, “One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?” Florens seems to be telling us, leave what you think you know at the door. If you’re willing to fumble through, like a child with new words they haven’t yet learned, you will find alternate ways of reading and understanding.

Taking approaches as diverse as cognitive literary studies, historical engagements with racial conflict, and the supernatural intersections of property and personhood, the three papers in this panel are “held together” by their critical interpretations that enrich both how we read A Mercy —in terms of the racial and textual narratives and counternarratives that it holds— and how we understand the historical context that the novel responds to.

This panel is co-organized by Lindsay Griffiths Brown (Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College) and Arianna Q. James (Assistant Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Cinema at Boston University), the latter of which will also serve as the moderator. Three panelists will give prepared talks of 15-20 minutes, leaving about 15 minutes of discussion and Q&A.

The presentations will begin with Jaya Shrivastava’s talk, which examines the reading experience of A Mercy through the lens of cognitive narratology and reader engagement. Drawing on recent scholarship in cognitive literary studies and reader-response theory, this paper argues that Morrison employs a mode of cognitive estrangement—disrupting linear coherence and conventional causality—to immerse the reader in the disorienting reality of the enslaved and the dispossessed. Ultimately, the paper situates A Mercy within a broader discourse on the politics of reading, illustrating how Morrison’s narrative techniques resist passive consumption and instead demand an active, immersive, and ethically charged mode of interpretation.

Then, Jack Bradford will argue that A Mercy’s depiction of colonial North America as having once been “pre-racial” might be better understood as the repositioning of Blackness over Indigeneity as marking American history’s primary Other. Morrison’s inclusion of Native Americans in the history of North American slavery appears to revise her earlier thesis, advanced in Playing in the Dark (1992), that American literature and culture has been constructed around the mutual antagonism (and occasional cooperation) of White and Black peoples. As this paper argues, however, A Mercy suggests that while the early history of the Americas had been one of Euro-Indian conflict, this dynamic is replaced by one of White-Black conflict.

Finally, Lindsay Griffiths Brown will explore how property, personhood, the physical, and the metaphysical come together in A Mercy at the intersection of “possession”—a term indicating both material ownership and spiritual inhabitation. Drawing on 17th-century superstition and demonology and scholarship on slavery, legal property, and embodiment, this paper highlights how A Mercy uses the supernatural to portray slavery’s collapse of boundaries between person and object. Ultimately, this paper argues that Morrison depicts ownership within the institution of slavery as a paranormal and existential phenomenon marked by the ontological slippage between persons and non-persons, giving new meaning to the novel’s demand to “own yourself.”

Together, these panelists explore readings of A Mercy from a range of fields and critical approaches, illuminating how the novel’s narrative structure and historical contexts challenge and deepen our understanding of race, belonging, and memory. Their diverse perspectives offer new insights into how we engage with the text and with the broader questions of identity and history it raises.