ABSTRACT
The emergence of minoritized literatures3 have not merely challenged and exploded the canon(s), rather, these literatures have imploded the canon(s). Implosion seems the applicable word here, if we take seriously Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s argument that ‘black women writers [are] generated less by neurotic anxiety or dis-ease than by an emancipatory impulse which freely engages both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse’ (Henderson, 1989:138). Black women’s writings have disrupted and reshaped what is thinkable in novelistic and poetic forms. Henderson’s statement places the writings of black women in a unique place of offering perspectives on sites of privilege and ‘disprivilege’. From such a site, my attempt is to read black women’s writings in order to raise two questions: What does Toni Morrison have to offer cultural and educational theorists? What can happen with Morrison’s work in classrooms? Using her most recent novel, Jazz, the earlier Tar Baby, and her critical writings, I wonder what it might mean for cultural and educational theorists to begin to work more actively through the polyvalent voices of black women writers in an effort to do something different to the theory and practice of education.4
