Enchantment as a Subversive force in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

Abstract

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Keywords

• Colorism. Enchantment. God Help the Child. Magical realism. Toni Morrison