This book examines Toni Morrison's fiction as a sustained effort to challenge the dominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman Beavers closely examines politics of scale and contentious politics in order to discern Morrison's larger intent of revealing the deep structure of power relations in black communities that will enable them to fashion counterhegemonic projects. The volume explores how Morrison stages her ruminations on the political imaginary in neighborhoods or small towns; rooms, houses or streets. Beavers argues that these spatial and domestic geographies are sites where the management of traumatic injury is integral to establishing a sense of place, proposing these "e;tight spaces"e; as sites where narratives are produced and contested; sites of inscription and erasure, utterance and silence.

This book examines Toni Morrison’s fiction as a sustained effort to challenge the dominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman Beavers closely examines politics of scale and contentious politics in order to discern Morrison's larger intent of revealing the deep structure of power relations in black communities that will enable them to fashion counterhegemonic projects. The volume explores how Morrison stages her ruminations on the political imaginary in neighborhoods or small towns; rooms, houses or streets. Beavers argues that these spatial and domestic geographies are sites where the management of traumatic injury is integral to establishing a sense of place, proposing these “tight spaces” as sites where narratives are produced and contested; sites of inscription and erasure, utterance and silence.  

Introduction.- Held in the Thrall: Morrison’s Southern Men and the Arrested Motion of Tight Space.- From Zero to Nowhere: Tight Space and the Topophilia of Violence.- The Housing of Hurt: The Optic of Tight Space inJazz.- A Measure of Last Resort: Limerence and the Geometrical Shape of Community inLove.- A Pox on All Your Houses: Susceptibility, Immunity, and the Dilemma of Allegory inA Mercy.- The Precarity of Freedom: Toni Morrison and the Post-Racial Moment.