Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and the Counterwriting of Negative Communities: A Postnational Novel

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is the counterwriting of a negative community, forged on affiliations and affects, as much as conflict and inequalities, which define the early beginnings of modernity in America; this community remains on the edges of the national imaginary and betrays another history of community in modernity, not yet bound or enchanted by the myth of the national community. In her postnational narration of this prenational negative community, Morrison problematizes the concept of the exceptional community that runs at the expense of the constituencies and their communities defined as liminal, dysfunctional, and always already in the negative.

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