Morrison is well known and likely to garner wide interest, and Song of Solomon is one of her most important books. It has been nearly eighteen years since the most recent collection of essays focused on Song of Solomon (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Song of Solomon, 2009), but the publication of two recent books, Dana A. Williams’s Toni at Random (Amistad, 2025) and Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026), indicates that interest in Morrison is resurging. This panel, which features new work by four up-and-coming scholars from four different institutions, expands Morrison studies via an in-depth engagement with Song of Solomon.
First, Meina Yates-Richards argues that Song of Solomon’s carefully-placed “acoustic cues and clues” serve as a key foundational element of Morrison’s Black maternal feminist project, one which situates Black women’s voices as central to the evolution of Black cultural histories and is vital to emancipatory self-actualization and “imagining communal freedom.” Her paper, “Sing[ing] Her Mother's Name: Sonic Resonance and Black Maternal Feminism in Song of Solomon,” complicates prior readings of the novel as Morrison’s response to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement through recent intersectional theoretical analyses of literature and sound studies.
A companion to the first presentation, Javiera Green’s “Unmothered Daughters, Unheard Mothers in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” engages directly with MLA President Herman Beavers’s call for consideration of how “in the face of calamity and contradiction,” emancipatory narratives “find ways to sing.” She discusses how Morrison directly addresses structural oppression and exclusionary spaces for Black women through the presence of what she defines as “mad black motherhood.” This concept asks what madness can accomplish, and Green argues that within the context of the novel, it operates as “a space where blood mothers, othermothers, and fictive kin can parent their offspring without stereotypes being imposed on them.” She presents madness as a theoretical construct necessary to critique “the lack of communal and structural support necessary to sustain mother-daughter relationships.”
The final pair of presentations explore Morrison's artistic innovation, arguing that the shortcomings of influential literary writers became a springboard for Morrison to break free and write in a way that would define her style and communicate Black experiences in complex and innovative ways.
Alice Davis Keane’s central claim of her presentation, “Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, ‘Restorying,’ and Outsider Women’s Language,” is that adopting a restorying lens helps to understand the ways Song of Solomon “restores interpretive agency for readers of color.” She argues that Morrison encountered a dead end as to what modernism offered her without a major revision or restorying. Focusing on one character, Pilate Dead, Keane accounts for how Morrison interacts with Virginia Woolf’s “outsider women” in a way that celebrates African American cultural heritage while “actively repair[ing] intersectional omissions in modernism’s canonical narratives.”
Finally, Deja Mason’s “Entangled Temporalities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” shows that in Song of Solomon, memory is a precursor for spiritual rebirth, an emancipatory-as-possible tool against the ravages of time as defined by one’s oppressors. Mason’s focus is on memory as it relates to the common modernist reevaluation of the function of time. These two concepts, she argues, are perpetually entangled and key to comprehending protagonist Milkman Dead’s spiritual rebirth. Mason suggests that Morrison’s celebrated novel Beloved (1987) has received a great amount of critical focus on memory in recent decades in a way that backgrounded how it appeared in some of her other works. She theorizes that memory is also an agentic disruptor of time in Song of Solomon. Inseparable from disillusionment, oppression, and subjectivity, memory disrupts linearity and pervasive, dominant cultural narratives.
In its soulful exploration of intergenerational trauma, Song of Solomon is a hallmark work that speaks directly to MLA’s 2027 theme of Emancipatory Narratives. This panel offers thoughtful and timely commentary on how, through wrestling with, sitting with, and seeing new beauty in the novel, attendees can grapple with the concept of emancipatory liberation.
*Each presentation will last 12-13 minutes in order to ensure a minimum of 15 minutes for discussion at the end.