This essay relates Toni Morrison's critical imperatives concerning the presence of racial formation in reading communities to rhetorical narrative theory's interest in the feedback among author, text, and readers. Through discussions of Morrison's critical writing and of Song of Solomon and Beloved, I examine how Morrison cultivated a Black-centered authorial audience for her texts, guiding readers to acknowledge the authority of Black intraracial dialogue and to wrestle with the sociopolitical implications of her work's imaginative engagement with history. Supplementing ample scholarship on the relationship of Morrison's essays to her fiction, I pay special attention to the forewords Morrison composed for the 2004 reprints of her early novels. In these forewords, Morrison insists on the role of her personal ancestors and ghosts in the production of her fiction, suggesting that the authorial audience's recognition of ghosts enables the robust appreciation and knowledge of Black social experience and history on which she insists.

本文将托尼·莫里森 (Toni Morrison) 关于阅读社区中存在种族形成的批判性命令与修辞叙事理论对作者、文本和读者之间反馈的兴趣联系起来。通过对莫里森的批判性写作和所罗门之歌与挚爱的讨论，我研究了莫里森如何为她的文本培养以黑人为中心的作者读者，引导读者承认黑人种族间对话的权威，并努力应对她的作品富有想象力地参与历史的社会政治影响。作为对莫里森散文与她小说之间关系的大量学术研究的补充，我特别关注莫里森为她早期小说 2004 年再版所写的前言。在这些前言中，莫里森坚持她的个人祖先和鬼魂在她的小说创作中的作用，表明作者读者对鬼魂的认识使她能够对她所坚持的黑人社会经历和历史产生强烈的欣赏和了解。