On the Idea of In(ter)dependence: Paradise and Foreign Policy

Since the publication of Toni Morrison's Paradise in 1997, critics have carefully excavated the complex national allegory running through the novel, finding in the story of the fictional town of Ruby a reframing, retelling, and critique of the foundational myths of American settlement and expansion. (1) Other critics have read the novel as a critical recording of the project of Black Nationalism, focusing, for instance, on the novel's use of the exodus narrative. (2) Both of these readings fail to grasp fully the allegorical content of Monison's novel by ignoring its complex account of foreign relations. Highlighting the relationship between Ruby and the Convent--analogous to the relationship between the United States and the developing world in the 1970s--I interpret Morrison's novel as a millennial text that reminds readers of the forgotten lessons of the 1970s, and especially of the economic lessons the US could have learned from that decade concerning the dependence of the national economy on the third world. Morrison has long been interested in what she calls an "Africanist" presence in key works of American fiction, (3) and I read Paradise as her account of how economic questions raised in especially vivid ways in the 1970s demand that we think beyond the nation-state. Paradise exposes the presence of the global third world in even the most apparently national of settings and significantly extends Morrison's project of revealing the blindness at the heart of national narratives, both by considering questions of American empire abroad and by returning us to a decade that has been largely forgotten. (4) If the 1990s are imagined as an era in which the problems of the Cold War had been erased, Morrison's novel signals that even during that period, dissenting voices reminded us that the US had forgotten important lessons about global life and the fragility of the US economy. More than simply a lament for what has been forgotten, however, Morrison's novel is also a cautionary tale that explains how this process of national amnesia was enacted and how the introspection of the 1970s erased geopolitical truths made visible during those years. Occurring between 1968 and 1976, the key events of the novel should attune us to how these events intersect with American history, especially since the act of violence around which the novel is structured occurs in 1976, the bicentennial anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. While critics have seen a version of the United States in Ruby, national allegory is only half the story the novel tells. By taking seriously the novel's historical setting and focusing on the relationships between Ruby and the Convent, we can see the novel as an expression of the limits of the nation-state as the ultimate economic horizon for conceptualizing human activity. I am interested less in national independence than in transnational interdependence, and I identify how Morrison critiques the idea of the self-sufficient nation-state through the politics of food and energy. My argument has five parts: the first part concerns the utility of reading the novel as a straightforward national allegory; the second suggests the limits of that approach and why the novel can instead be thought of as an allegorical account of the narrowness of nationally circumscribed understandings of political economy; the third concerns Morrison's interest in one of the most pressing questions raised by the early 1970s, the question of natural resources; and the fourth reveals Morrison's account of just how these lessons were erased from cultural memory. Finally, I suggest that Paradise's troubled allegorical content should be read as a reflection of the difficulties of arriving at a truly global consciousness and the necessity of continuing to work toward that goal; indeed, the myriad ways in which Morrison invites and then complicates allegorical readings suggest the complexity of contemporary geopolitics. …