"Your Life is Already Artful": Black and Indigenous Artistic Lifeworlds in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich

Abstract

This thesis investigates the depiction of Black or Indigenous artistic lifeworlds in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and The Round House. While critical scholarship has addressed the significance of artmaking in these novels, many past analyses do not account for the nuance in which Morrison and Erdrich present oral and written storytelling in these books. Critics tend to interpret representations of oral storytelling in these novels solely as cultural signification or political resistance, and writing as an oppressive white supremacist, colonial tool. Without minimizing the importance of these readings, I argue that Morrison and Erdrich also portray storytelling to show how the human inclination towards artistic creation belongs to Black and Indigenous peoples too. By expanding on Patricia Waugh’s metafictional theory and Jack Halberstam’s notion of generative failure, I show through diegetic and formal analysis how Morrison and Erdrich each demonstrate and celebrate Black and Indigenous facility over imaginative uses of language and form. A holistic understanding of these novels depends on our ability to identify how these authors insist on lifelong, innovative Black or Indigenous artmaking.