Community Solidarity and Quest for Home: Negotiating Nation Space in Toni Morrison’s Love

Abstract

The African American’s quest for home in the larger nation space has been thwarted by a homogenizing tendency on the part of the white culture which does not advocate the flourishing of difference and ensures the subsuming of difference in the so-called mainstream life in the name of national unity. This hegemonic imposition of homogeneity problematizes the community solidarity of African Americans, who, relegated to the margin by the supremacist white culture, have to look for home in their community life. However, in the course of their pursuit of home in the solidarity of community life African Americans put a challenge not only to the meta-narrative of the larger white culture’s projection of the black, but also to the colonial historiography constructed by the proponents of the same culture. The study is an attempt to better understand the African American’s search for home between the wider nation space and the narrower community space as exemplified by Toni Morrison in her novel Love.