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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
we're all listening to this podcast because, well, we love classic books. It's hugely exciting to be giving a big plug to our podcasting friends, the team from Book Riot, who are making the Fantastic Books podcast zero to well-read. I listen to it all the time and I learn from it constantly.
The team is Jeff O'Neill and Rebecca Shinsky from Book Riot, and they've been talking about books on the internet together for almost 15 years. They've heard from a lot of people who feel like they missed the window to read the so-called important books. So they created Zero to Well Read. It's a podcast that tells you everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read.
From classics to contemporary hits and social media sensations, you hear from Jeff and Rebecca why they're so great, what you should know about them, what makes them weird and fun and strange and why they matter. These guys are willing to go in and get their hands dirty talking about all sorts of books from the...
unquestionable classics to what we might call emerging classics or contemporary classics. Have a listen. Can't recommend them highly enough. We're halfway through our special series on the great American writer, Toni Morrison, the writer who many readers worldwide think of perhaps as the very greatest African-American writer.
And today I have a special conversation with a colleague of mine at Princeton, a friend and someone whose work I hugely admire. This is Professor Autumn Womack. She is one of the leading Toni Morrison scholars in the world today. And in 2023, Autumn led a curatorial team for an incredible archival exhibition at Princeton.
It was called Tony Morrison Sites of Memory, and it used never-before-seen archival objects from the Tony Morrison papers at Princeton University to shed new light on the way that Tony Morrison worked as an artist, a writer, and a major modern thinker about American culture and African-American identity.
In the aftermath of this project, Autumn started a new book, a biography of Toni Morrison's novels, using the work that she did in the archives to retell the story of Morrison's creative process and her practice. That's forthcoming from... Knopf.
Autumn is an award-winning scholar of 19th century American literature, African American culture and writing, and she's done archival work on 19th century history. It's a huge pleasure for me to get to talk to Autumn about her work in the and imaginative practice. So Professor Autumn Womack, it's such a delight to have you on The Secret Life of Books.
Thank you for having me. It's fun to be here.
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Chapter 2: What makes Toni Morrison a classic American writer?
I think it has everything to do with the way that Black childhood as a concept is not... Right. And there's many people who have written about this in novels or essays or whatever. The concept of childhood is not something that was readily available in the 19th century and enslavement. Right. As soon as you're adolescent, then you are an adult, essentially.
And so I think she's interested in this kind of overlooked, invisible child. category, historically. But there's also, I think, even a more simple explanation that I think she might say something like children have really interesting things to say, and we don't take them seriously. And what would happen if we listened?
And what would happen if we took seriously the viewpoints or the outlooks or the perspectives of these little girls? How might we see the world differently, if we could see it through their eyes, which she literally does.
And, you know, other other Black writers of this time period, like Toni K. Bambara, who she's close friends with, is also like really thinking about what does it mean to take the Black child's perspective seriously as a storyteller, as a narrator who can rise to the level of of the adult narrator.
I love that. I'm also thinking about sort of Black childhood as it had appeared in American writing by white writers before the 19th century and then into the 20th century. And I wonder whether there's a sense in which Morrison and her contemporaries are, you know, rewriting that consciously in terms of literary history as well as the history of childhood.
Rewriting it or... Like saying, what would happen if we put them at the center, right? Or even, I mean, thinking about like the Dick and Jane primer. What would happen if we cast this primer with Pico and her family? Like then it kind of becomes, it dissembles. What if we interchange what happens to the story and what parts of it need to be reassembled or reworked?
Or what parts of the architecture actually just can't hold this experience together?
That's really interesting. I'm sort of putting you on the spot. Which parts do you think don't hold? In The Bluest Eye, but Morrison's other writing where, you know, she's testing the template in a very purposeful way. Sometimes it holds up, sometimes it doesn't.
You know, it's such a good question. What part of the templates don't hold up if we think of something as simple as like a myth or origin story or a fairy tale or something like that? Right. But there's something about that is a progressive story where something gets resolved.
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