SOURCE: Duvall, John N. “The Authorized Morrison: Reflexivity and the Historiographic.” In The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness, pp. 119-51. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

In the following essay, Duvall examines elements of metafiction in relation to African-American female identity in Morrison's Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise.

With Tar Baby, Morrison lays to rest much of her anxiety about her identity as an African-American woman novelist. This is what I mean by “the authorized Morrison.” She has in the course of her preceding fictions largely authorized herself, constructing a powerful position from which to write and speak. If this study contributes anything to an understanding of Morrison, it is the way her identifying fictions—her first four novels—do not simply thematize identity formation, they perform it. As I have argued, it is a highly self-reflexive process: as Morrison writes, she enacts the identity she was...