Buried perspectives

In examining representations of engagements with the North American landscape in the fiction of Toni Morrison, this article seeks to explore the author’s revision of dominant discourses about the topography and symbolic spaces of the continent and her exposure thereby of historical structures of power. Focusing on her fourth novel, Song of Solomon (1977), it traces how Morrison attempts to give voice to African American experience and identity and to revisit and contest familiar stories of national belonging and being in the land. In crafting tales of black displacement, dispossession, estrangement, travel, discovery, connection and home, the author is found to excavate buried perspectives and shape her own potent narrative act.