ABSTRACT
This chapter provides hybridity as articulated in Toni Morrison's work. Morrison's affinity with postcolonial writers is seen in hybridity or radical contradiction and ambivalence towards received tradition, values and identity. Morrison and her postcolonial counterparts find the realist novel's claims to authority and completeness of knowledge, reason and ethics insufferable. The linguistic system Morrison deconstructs is rooted in commodified popular culture: film, clothes and fashion, toys, freedom of movement and space. Morrison challenges the language of self-referentiality that has been used to support the idea of a free-standing, self-forming white male identity and authority. Morrison seems to indicate that the history of injury holds possibilities for dissolution and regeneration for the black community. Morrison's treatment of conflictual relations between blacks and whites rarely takes the form of a cataclysmic confrontation, avoiding binarism and Manichean extremism. Morrison elaborates the concern with identity in great detail in Sula, where she interrogates the gendered subject positions ascribed to black women.
