• Reading Race and Power in Toni Morrison's A Mercy
• Angelyn Mitchell (bio)

In her 1997 essay titled "Home," Toni Morrison wrote this sobering sentence: "I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter" (3). How it has mattered, of course, across time and across identities has been the subject of much scholarly and creative engagement. Most recently, the field of critical race studies has made more legible critical analyses of race and its intersections, and Morrison's contribution to critical race studies is immeasurable. Morrison's groundbreaking essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1987) and her book of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) are both foundational to understanding how race in the United States has "mattered" in the literary arts. Her critical interventions foreground theretofore unexamined constructions of race in American literature, especially Anglo-American literature, thus reshaping its study. In her ninth novel, A Mercy (2008), Morrison returns to the subject of race as she imagines racial constructions in the 1680s in pre-America. A Mercy was published at a historic moment—November 2008—one week after the election of the first African American president of the United States, President Barack Obama. Ironic now and unbelievable to many then, conversations of whether his election signaled a postracial America abounded. Serendipitously, Morrison's exploration of the idea of a preracial America added to this moment of historic racial significance. Discussing A Mercy upon its publication, Morrison explained that in it she was "interested in separating racism from slavery" ("Have Mercy"). In reimagining the seemingly authoritative American origins narrative, she set the novel during a time before Blackness, slavery and racism were imbricated and before slavery was legally and synonymous with Blackness. Doing so highlights the constructed nature of racist ideologies in the nation's founding and also highlights how the racial capital of [End Page 121] whiteness—its power—was central in the nation's origins.¹ In other words, material and physical privileges are central to Morrison's construction of whiteness in the novel. One might wonder whether it is possible to separate race from the institution of slavery, because we have never lived, as Morrison wrote, in a world where race did not matter.

I am interested here in thinking about how identities raced as white in the novel, despite Morrison's stated intent, depend on the synergy of the Africanist presence, her term from Playing in the Dark that signals Blackness, thus making whiteness read in legible and familiar ways in A Mercy. The white characters may be read by what I think of as a hermeneutic of whiteness that readers acquire experientially through the pedagogy of society's "master narrative." In an interview with Claudia Tate, she explained her writerly goals: "My writing expects, demands participatory reading. … The reader supplies the emotions. … Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book" (Tate 125). In A Mercy, Toni Morrison explores racialized power relations in early pre-America. To do so, she creates spaces for the reader to enter the narrative—what she called "participatory reading." Morrison's probe of the relationship between whiteness and power; for example, her depiction of white characters with power or with access to power, unlike her nonwhite characters, encourages readers to think energetically about how racialized power was constructed in what would become the United States. If the novel's setting is before race became an index of personal freedom, why is race-based enslavement legible? In what follows, I will consider how the characters of Jacob and Rebekka Vaark, in spite of Morrison's aims to separate racism from slavery, represent white supremacist patriarchy and its maintenance of systemic oppressive structures in pre-America precodification, and I will consider how Morrison encourages participatory reading that depends on readers' adeptness in reading the Black/white binary.

In A Mercy, Morrison's white protagonists occupy positions of privilege as ownership-material and bodily—defines their position in the fledging early Republic. In the chapters dedicated to Jacob and Rebekka's points of view, the master...

• 阅读托妮·莫里森的《仁慈》中的种族与权力
• 安吉琳·米切尔（简介）

托妮·莫里森 (Toni Morrison) 在 1997 年题为《家》的文章中写下了这句发人深省的句子：“我和我们任何人都没有生活在一个种族无关紧要的世界”(3)。当然，它在不同时间和不同身份下的重要性一直是许多学术和创造性参与的主题。最近，批判种族研究领域对种族及其交叉点做出了更清晰的批判分析，莫里森对批判种族研究的贡献是不可估量的。莫里森的开创性论文《未言而喻的事情：美国文学中的非裔美国人的存在》（1987年）和她的文学批评书《在黑暗中玩耍：白人与文学想象力》（1992年）都是理解美国种族问题的基础在文学艺术中具有“重要意义”。她的批判性干预凸显了美国文学，特别是英美文学中迄今为止未经审查的种族建构，从而重塑了其研究。在她的第九部小说《仁慈》（A Mercy，2008）中，莫里森回到了种族主题，想象了 1680 年代前美国的种族结构。《慈悲》是在 2008 年 11 月这一历史性时刻出版的，即美国第一位非裔美国总统巴拉克·奥巴马 (Barack Obama) 当选一周后。关于他的当选是否标志着后种族美国的讨论比比皆是，现在看来颇具讽刺意味，而当时的许多人都难以置信。偶然的是，莫里森对前种族美国理念的探索为这一具有历史性种族意义的时刻增添了色彩。莫里森在讨论《仁慈》的出版时解释说，她在其中“对将种族主义与奴隶制分开感兴趣”（“仁慈”）。在重新想象看似权威的美国起源叙事时，她将小说设定在黑人、奴隶制和种族主义交织在一起以及奴隶制合法化并与黑人同义之前的时期。这样做凸显了建国过程中种族主义意识形态的建构本质，也凸显了[完第 121 页]白人的种族资本——它的力量——在国家起源中的核心地位。¹换句话说，物质和身体特权是莫里森小说中白人建构的核心。人们可能想知道是否有可能将种族与奴隶制分开，因为正如莫里森所写，我们从未生活在一个种族无关紧要的世界。

我在这里感兴趣的是思考小说中白人的身份如何竞争，尽管莫里森声明了意图，但依赖于非洲主义者存在的协同作用，她在黑暗中玩耍的术语标志着黑人，从而使白人以清晰和熟悉的方式被解读在《慈悲》中。白人角色可以通过我认为的白人解释学来解读，读者可以通过社会“主叙事”的教学法经验地获得这种解释学。在接受克劳迪娅·泰特采访时，她解释了自己的写作目标：“我的写作期望、需要参与式阅读……读者提供情感……然后我们（你，读者，我，作者）一起制作这本书“（泰特125）。在《仁慈》中，托妮·莫里森探讨了前美国早期的种族化权力关系。为此，她为读者创造了进入叙事的空间——她称之为“参与式阅读”。莫里森对白人与权力关系的探讨例如，与她的非白人角色不同，她对拥有权力或有权获得权力的白人角色的描述鼓励读者积极思考种族化权力是如何在后来的美国中构建的。如果小说的背景是在种族成为个人自由指标之前，为什么基于种族的奴役是清晰可见的？在下文中，我将考虑雅各布·瓦尔克和丽贝卡·瓦尔克的角色，尽管莫里森的目标是将种族主义与奴隶制分开，却代表了白人至上主义父权制及其在美国前法典化中对系统性压迫结构的维持，我将考虑莫里森如何鼓励参与式阅读，这取决于读者阅读黑白二元的熟练程度。

在《仁慈》中，莫里森笔下的白人主角占据了物质和身体所有权的特权地位，这定义了他们在刚刚起步的早期共和国中的地位。在专门讨论雅各布和丽贝卡观点的章节中，大师……