Abstract: This article comparatively analyzes the printed (1987) and audiobook (2007) versions of Baby Suggs’s preaching scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved against the backdrop of performance and ritual within the Black homiletic tradition specifically, and Afro-diasporic religious practice and belief more broadly. I consider how the impetus towards performance evident in Morrison’s novel, as well as in the traditions of Black homiletics and Afro-diasporic ritual, is flipped on its head in the audiobook, where Morrison explicitly refuses to “perform” for her listening audience. By using a method of interpretation attuned to issues of dramatic action and effectiveness, I show how Morrison’s visual and sonic presentational maneuvers mirror the homiletics and spiritual tenets of her novel’s preacher character, Baby Suggs. More specifically, I contend that both character and author encourage audience engagement to call forth collective experiences of embodied love and imagination. In the novel’s plot and presentation, these experiences of collaborative meaning-making counter theological and political anthropologies founded in colonialism and racist oppression, and present formulations of complex subjectivity embedded within spiritual and physical networks of collective being. I argue that Baby Suggs’s homiletics and theology focused on love, grace, and imagination are key to better understanding why and how Morrison chose to tell the story of Beloved .
Anne Margaret Castro (Fri,) studied this question.