Includes bibliographical references (pages 139-145) and index.

Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle portrays Nobel laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins, between dominant America and its signifying/significant other. Her novels are seen afresh as imagining a black community while revising the project of cultural nationalism from a black feminist perspective. Written from a postcolonial feminist perspective, this adept analysis shows that Toni Morrison, far from evading feminism, enables us to map the complex allegiances of a black feminism that is neither antimale nor bourgeois, but critical of both black and white masculist discourses of violence that it must necessarily enter, understand, and transform.

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