Summary

In Black Matter(s), Morrison examines the field of literary criticism and the role of what she calls American Africanism in it. For her, ‘Africanism’ is a “term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes” (141). She wants to know how Africanistic ‘others’ in literature are characterized, accommodated, treated, and coded in American literature, and focuses heavily on American romance as a genre in which Africanism is frequently present yet overlooked. She traces qualities of autonomy, newness, difference, authority, and absolute power in the American romance’s quintessential ‘American hero,’ all of which are conceived of and shaped in relation to an ‘other’ which is most often an Africanistic presence, person...