reproductive justice, environmental justice, Toni Morrison

Parisa Changizi’s “The Story of Two Houses: An Ecofeminist Reading of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home,” focuses on the intersection of Environmental Justice and Reproductive Justice Movements. A salient yet slightly obscure facet of the juncture of the two movements is how marginalized communities and Third World women are targeted by racist, nativist, xenophobic, and even supposedly pro-environmental discourses and policies in the name of population control. This study of Morrison’s novels focuses on this facet, exploring how America ultimately came to treat Black bodies as vessels of future polluting agents. A Mercy (2008) is an exceptional narrative in Morrison’s oeuvre in which she burrows her way back to almost pre-racial and preracist colonial America. Linking colonialism, slavery, (emerging) racism, and the environment, Morrison shows that racist venom can stealthily spill out into the natural world, presaging how marginalized groups will be left to suffer the brunt of environmental degradation in the future of this land. Although the ensuing full-scale (environmental) ramifications of the Europeancolonialization of North America and the institution of slavery are notexplored in this story, A Mercy builds a bridge back to where it all began, making itself, in effect, a prelude to every other story in Morrison’s body of work, Home (2012) being a case in point. The exploitative gender-based racist practices that were taking form in colonial America persisted long enough to violate the polluting Black female bodies in the 1950s, which Morrison described as a period of racial violence in American history from McCarthy hearings to eugenic abuse of Black women and the syphilis trials on Black men.

Parisa Changizi’s “The Story of Two Houses: An Ecofeminist Reading of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home,” focuses on the intersection of Environmental Justice and Reproductive Justice Movements. A salient yet slightly obscure facet of the juncture of the two movements is how marginalized communities and Third World women are targeted by racist, nativist, xenophobic, and even supposedly pro-environmental discourses and policies in the name of population control. This study of Morrison’s novels focuses on this facet, exploring how America ultimately came to treat Black bodies as vessels of future polluting agents. A Mercy (2008) is an exceptional narrative in Morrison’s oeuvre in which she burrows her way back to almost pre-racial and preracist colonial America. Linking colonialism, slavery, (emerging) racism, and the environment, Morrison shows that racist venom can stealthily spill out into the natural world, presaging how marginalized groups will be left to suffer the brunt of environmental degradation in the future of this land. Although the ensuing full-scale (environmental) ramifications of the Europeancolonialization of North America and the institution of slavery are notexplored in this story, A Mercy builds a bridge back to where it all began, making itself, in effect, a prelude to every other story in Morrison’s body of work, Home (2012) being a case in point. The exploitative gender-based racist practices that were taking form in colonial America persisted long enough to violate the polluting Black female bodies in the 1950s, which Morrison described as a period of racial violence in American history from McCarthy hearings to eugenic abuse of Black women and the syphilis trials on Black men.