Critical Responses About the Black Family in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child: Conflicts in Comradeship

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Critical Responses About the Black Family in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child explores the integral role of what Kobi Kambon has called the conscious African family in developing commercial success stories such as those of Morrisons protagonist, Bride. Initially, Brides accomplishments are an extension of a superficial cult of celebrity which inhabits and undermines the development of meaningful interpersonal relationships until a significant literal and metaphorical journey helps her redefine success by facilitating the building of community and family.

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Coming at the issues from the inside, the collaboration between Rhone Fraser, Natalie King-Pedroso & Company, Conflicts in Comradeship, provides a timely and useful contribution to studies on the African American family along with analyses of Toni Morrison's God Help the Child.
In 1937, Margaret Walker wrote, "For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way/from confusion from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, / trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, / all the faces all the adams and eves and their countless/ generations..." Toni Morrison's 11th novel, God Help the Child rings with Walker's sentiments, and Natalie King-Pedroso and Rhone Frasier's Critical Responses about the Black Family in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child: Conflicts in Comradeship does as well. This important collection of essays tackles the novel as a culminating moment in Morrison's thought, a grief-filled extension of The Bluest Eye, and as a vessel sailing the African Ocean of mysteries. The text, like Morrison's own, reaches out to the "shackled and tangled among ourselves" with the aim of letting a "beauty full of healing" come forth. Conflicts in Comradeship offers a unique and brave approach to criticism, collaboration, and reading Morrison's under appreciated final work of fiction.

Author Bio

Rhone Fraser is independent scholar and member of the Toni Morrison Society. Natalie King-Pedroso is associate professor in the department of English and modern languages at Florida A&M University.