This session, has three presentations of approximately 12 minutes each. This will allow ample time for discussion of each paper. Since there is no respondent, both presenters and audience will be able to respond to the ideas presented amply. Our Presider will ensure time limits on all presentations.

This session explores connections and influences between Toni Morrison’s literary output and that of other writers from across the globe. Toni Morrison’s global appeal lies in her representation of intergenerational trauma suffered by African Americans, and other marginalized groups. It draws affinities with writers who write about oppression in varied places as Libya ,Lebannon and even the South Asian diaspora. The experiences of slavery, exploitation of labor, women's familial oppression, grief and trauma extend beyond groups. Toni Morrison has been inspirational to writers globally and therefore important in liberating women's voices. The interconnections presented here show her global reach.

Farah Siddiqui compares Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri in terms of affective labor. Affective labor, according to Arline Hochschild gives priority to the feeling of others and ignoring one’s own needs. The affective labor is not only productive or reproductive, but by-productive. According to Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotions certain affects are produced and circulated and they intersect with race and gender. We include this one presentation on a seemingly privileged South Asian writer who describes the constricted voices of South Asian diasporic women. Morrison’s works are a great influence on authors like Jhumpa Lahiri who describe the affective labor of hyphenated identity. Lahiri continues to deal with how the trauma of migration is sometimes intergenerational when the first generation of immigrants, especially women, fail to assimilate. Morrison of course shows how African American women are denied assimilation.

Touria Khannous undertakes a comparative analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Najwa Bin Shatwan's Slave Yards (2019, English trans. 2021), examining how each novel engages with the spectral aspect of racialized slavery. This is direct descendant of Toni Morrison's work. While Morrison's work is situated within the post-Civil War United States and Bin Shatwan's within the 19th and 20th-century Libyan slave trade, both novels confront the paradox of representing an atrocity that the official historical record elides. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concepts of hauntology, the paradoxical presence of an absent past, as well as the archive as a site of both preservation and exclusion, the author argues that both novels draw on spectral return to contest the limits of dominant historiography. Similarly, both novels draw on what Morrison terms "rememory" to challenge official historical silence about slavery. Khanous also draws on Kimberly Crenshaw's intersectional approach to analyze the position of Black motherhood within both texts. Crenshaw's concept reveals how enslaved mothers in each novel face overlapping systems of oppression that are irreducible to any single axis of domination.

Tanja Stampfl and Emily Clark connect Toni Morrison and Hanan al-Shaykh, the south Lebanese author. While Morrison and al-Shaykh are authors rooted in their respective and disparate cultures, yet reading these two seminal writers side by side reveals the universality of their themes, especially gendered liminal spaces. This presentation will analyze how male violence undermines the notion of “home” in both Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and Hanan al-Shaykh’s 1980 novel The Story of Zahra. Presenters will examine the female protagonists’ subversions of the concepts of motherhood and madness. Male violence and patriarchal perceptions of home and gender push both female protagonists to the margins, both socially and psychologically. Sethe and Zahra’s lack of home intertwines with patriarchal notions of motherhood that serve to subjugate and humiliate them. Both novels expose the ambivalence towards motherhood when Zahra repeatedly aborts her pregnancies, and Sethe is forced to kill her daughter. Only healing acts of mothering from the community temporarily counteract the male violence that permeates common spaces and denies the women a sense of stable home, healthy motherhood, and unquestioned belonging.

Basically this panel, which is in tandem with an online session on Morrison and Arab writers, attempts to show that the writings of the marginalized women from the MENA and the one South Asian Writer are greatly influenced by their reading of Toni Morrison as reflected in the way echoes of her work can be seen in these newer novels. They all comprise emancipatory narratives. Hopefully we will give exposure to a forthcoming volume of essays on this topic.