The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison
Editor: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem, CUNY
Call for Chapters:
This is the final draft of the call for chapter proposals for a volume I was commissioned to edit, The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison. (I posted an earlier draft; it is now, here, finalized.) This companion text is intended for a scholarly audience and as support for newer Morrison scholars as they approach their research.
Different from some companions, the Routledge Research Companion series publishes cutting-edge research rather than mostly or entirely secondary material. The secondary nature of a companion—that it informs readers about scholarly trends and history or generally accepted understandings of an author and her work—is to be built into each chapter. Each chapter is to point the way forward in terms of new directions in the study, interpretation, and theorization of Morrison’s oeuvre and they are to review, in a thoroughgoing manner, existing scholarship on their topic area or theme, to fill out the picture in terms of where and what Morrison studies has been, what scholars have been thinking, writing, and arguing for since she started publishing.
Largely what we want to accomplish here is to tell the history of Morrison studies, through those reviews, and importantly to create a vision for it going forward or for the 21st Century. That is, to think beyond some of the more or less entrenched, perhaps restrictive, borders surrounding the reception and interpretation of Morrison, some of the givens that “live” in the knowledge produced to date on this oeuvre. The research on Morrison has, to a certain extent, been controlled, one might say, or too much “owned” by too few voices and perspectives. Going forward, how do we think beyond those limits or outside accustomed responses to Morrison? How create new and fruitful passages, meanings, readings, interpretive leaps and new knowledges inspired by the work of this Black woman writer and thinker, this universally celebrated Nobel Laureate?
If this is helpful to know in developing your proposal, I’ve already received excellent proposals on the following general topics:
--(homoerotic) colonial desire and carcerality
--queerness, fugitivity, and futurity
--a study in the recently opened archive, The Toni Morrison Papers, and projected impacts
--a chapter taking on the gargantuan area of mothers and mothering
--and, a chapter on the figure of the daughter
--I’m likely to have a chapter on the character “Beloved” in multiple guises across multiple novels
I hope to see several additional responses, mostly from today’s Morrison scholars—that is, for the book to be comprised of their work, though not entirely. I say “not entirely” in that this call is open to junior scholars, perhaps “dissertators” working on Morrison and doing excellent, innovative thinking. Importantly, too, the volume is to feature work from a diverse group of scholars around the world, to be international and varied both in terms of approach and in terms of contributor-authors. Routledge is known for its strength as a scholarly publisher with a remarkably (race, gender, geographic, and otherwise) ranging global authorship; this collection continues that legacy within the context of Toni Morrison studies.
Lastly, any chapter of this collection will be eligible for Open Access, for those interested in that or whose universities encourage it. Open Access can mean greater exposure, both for the book and for the individual scholar's contribution.
A one- or two-page proposal, including clear direction re: methodology and a bio, is due by 4/30/22. Email it to: mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu (In terms of methodology: where, how, in what ways your chapter enters or fits into the conversation in progress, what you are innovating or primarily responding to, these should be clear as well as the theoretical scaffolding for the analysis. This can be achieved either through a separate statement, a working bibliography, or simply across/through the content of your proposal.)
In the meantime, questions or suggestions, if there is anything you would like to discuss, please don’t hesitate to reach out: mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu (My own bio is copied, below, if helpful.)
Bio: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (she/her) completed a Ph.D. in English at The Graduate Center-CUNY under the mentorship of Wayne Koestenbaum. She is Professor of English at Kingsborough-CUNY and has taught at The Graduate Center-CUNY, Drew University, Hunter College-CUNY, and Eugene Lang. She is a postcolonial scholar working on Anglophone writing of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Maureen specializes in historical literature, particularly that of Ireland and African America, as well as the wider literatures of partition. Her research looks at imperial borders, like those imposed through partition schemes, at political justice, especially reparations, at social justice of race, class, and gender, and at the poetics, in poetry and prose, of conflict, trauma, and silence. Maureen’s first book The Literature of Northern Ireland appeared from Palgrave in 2015. In 2019, a second book-length study titled Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian was brought out by Rowman and Littlefield. In 2020, Routledge published Maureen’s third monograph, Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations, and a collection she co-edited and for which she wrote the introduction, The Economics of Empire. The article “Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian’s Diaries and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses’” appeared in a special issue of Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE), Vol. 4, no. 2 (Dec. 2021), along with an interview with McGuckian. Other recent articles include “A Consciousness of Streets: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Partition” (Synthesis, 2016) and “Drawing the Border, Queering the Nation: Nation Trouble in Breakfast on Pluto and The Crying Game” (Gender Forum, 2016). Maureen is at work on three monographs: the collection Imperial Debt, on reparations for empire; she was commissioned to edit The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison; and, she’s writing a single-author volume, Poetics of the Fragment. Also under development is a chapter on Joyce’s “The Dead” and other postcolonial fiction (Coetzee, Pamuk, Naipaul, Beckett) that uses the triptych: snow, silence, and sleep as central allegory. Maureen is now serving a three-year term on the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR).
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