Canon-Making and Unmaking
by JOSH MYERS
in Spring 2025
Jillian M Rock, “ofwater,” 2024
The canon is a construct. It is also a war. The humanities are not immune from their complicity in the war that misnames us. The world of literature then is a complex one, where questions of inclusion and power continue to dominate the very basis of how we decide what stories to tell and what they might mean. Where do we go to experience all that Black stories can do? And who controls and produces those spaces?
Academic departments of literature face multiple threats to their authority. Often from inside the house. Social media formations like BookTok assure us that they too can assess literary validity. Amazon shapes the market and access for readers in obscene ways, while public libraries are forced to concede space in the war for literary space every day. This set of conditions, which were already grave, will only get more dangerous with the increasing surveillance and incorporative possibilities of artificial intelligence.
But readers and writers have power. It is part of our cultural DNA to make the word do things that turns power upside down. The fate of an autonomous frame of reference for Black Study might hang in the balance if we accept that the price of admission is access to a canon. Far more importantly, there is the question of whether our desires for canonicity will even resolve the war? Or is our writing something else entirely, even as it knows it is at war and fighting?
Toni Morrison’s editorship at Random House is one of many opportunities to think through this vexing dilemma. Dana A. Williams’s Toni at Random offers a historical portrait of the fraught conditions of Black women’s writing within a racist publish industry that still thinks it should dominate the process through which the best writers are known. Throughout much of the 1970s, Morrison served as an editor in one of the largest publishing houses in the world and in an field where there were few nonwhite men. It was a moment where Black Power had recast the question of control and authority. We wanted our own things. To get them, we wanted to create an entirely new society. As an editor, the easiest thing for Morrison to do would have been to build a list that was simply a Black mirror image of the mainstream bestseller. But in the 1970s, that would have meant compromise. Which also meant it was not an option. We were at war and things would have to be different.
Organized thematically, the book takes us through the publication history via a mixture of book history and intellectual biography—of both Morrison and her authors. In the seventh chapter, titled “The Two Tonis,” we get a glimpse of the stakes of this war. Amid much uncertainty regarding the direction of the Black Arts Movement, Morrison acquired two short fiction collections—Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds are Still Alive (1977) where Toni Cade Bambara asked the critical question of “How do we ensure space for our children?” and “a new question with Sea Birds—How are we faring now that the energy is shifting?” (96.) One might call these existential questions. Or it could just be the way our people “have always theorized.” In these collections, Bambara takes the form of the short story inside the world of Black folk just living, a feeling you can feel in the words. When Morrison reached out to Lucille Clifton for a blurb, her impressions of Bambara got us to the real heart of her practice: “She must love us very much” (91).
One of the stories they excised from The Sea Birds are Still Alive was a piece called “The Salt Eaters.” Wanting her to fully commit to long fiction, Morrison saw potential in the project and prevailed on Bambara to rewrite it as a longer piece. Published in 1980, The Salt Eaters is a story which documents the war’s toll on the life of the protagonist Velma Henry. For Bambara the work was “about one thing—an exploration of the struggle for wholenesss” while also involving “many other things as well” (100). Velma’s wholeness amid a Black struggle that had taken Third World anticolonial revolution seriously (this is the context for Bambara’s own travels throughout the Third World as Williams and others document), meant the characters had a way for taking over in a way that went beyond Bambara’s own “imagination.” In a stunning moment of writer and sisterly love, Bambara asks Morrison for advice: “Perhaps you could have a talk with her (Minnie Ransom) and maybe explain that I am new at this so lighten up a little. I shall need some hard headed directives” (101).
They then spent three days together in Morrison’s home on the Hudson. Bambara wrote. Morrison edited. They worked The Salt Eaters into the “intricate and almost cunning structure” the novel would take (102). I doubt anything concerning the “business” side was foremost on their minds in those three days. Getting the language right would help situate the stakes for the possibility of a new or transformed canon—but what differentiated that moment in real ways was that both Bambara and Morrison were part of Black women’s writing and artist collectives as well as informal circles, where the question of what the writing could do mattered.[1] They organized to ensure that the danger of appropriation and the capitalist hijinks of the publishing world would not minimize their radical edge. If we were writing to make revolution irresistible, then you also needed other people. You needed to sit together for three days and work it out. Black women knew this because this they always knew. We do not engage in warfare alone. This is Bambara and Morrison’s story.
The Sisterhood. To the far right are Toni Morrison and June Jordan.
The challenge was how to wage this war and maintain access to the world of canon-making, as the publishing industry met an academic one which increasingly offered multicultural discourse as a new route for Black visibility. The genius of Morrison was to ensure that a writer like Bambara would even have space to share their ideas, and to show that there was indeed a readership for complex, even radical ideas issuing from Black women’s lived experiences. Still, there were contradictions and Williams explores these in depth, revealing the ways Morrison wrestled with everything from arguing for appropriate advances for authors to the cover designs and marketing and promotional strategies that made sense for these works. Morrison believed in a kind of intellectual autonomy of Black thought and creativity in a way that not all her coworkers believed would produce the returns they desired. She had to do lots of convincing on both sides that the politics of the business were worth it in the end. Nothing could be left to chance in a publishing world that still was not sure what it meant to publish the ideas of Black folk.
June Jordan’s time with Random House captures the ways this did not always work out. In a chapter that also covers Morrison’s work with poets Barbara Chase-Riboud and Lucille Clifton, Williams explores the publishing history for Jordan’s Things That I Do in the Dark (1977). It would always be a difficult proposition for an industry with little regard for poetry (which by contrast, as Williams relates, was the dominant form within the Black Arts Movement). A series of miscommunications and missteps would eventually lead to a deep freeze in their relationship, despite attempts to smooth things over. It is one of those moments where one can only lament what might have been. Jordan would spend the next decade running afoul of the official expectation of the loyal, patriotic subject as the era of neoliberalism dawned. While Morrison, in her own way, would begin to develop a critique of these same forces in both her long fiction and essay projects.[2] Even as Morrison fought hard to ensure the commercial success of Jordan’s work—as she did all her authors—the nature of the industry seemed to never feel that there was a natural home or space for such work. In the end, the intervention of the industry in the space of Black creativity broke their relationship.
The fallout of this moment was a culture war that cannot really be won under the terms of literary and academic “legitimacy.” As Erica R. Edwards has shown, even as the canon has stretched to include our stories, Black literary study continues to exist in an uneasy détente with political systems that can pull the plug at any given moment.[3] And the publishing industry does pull the plug at every expedient turn. Morrison did not believe we should put all our eggs in one basket, and in the end the question of making sure our stories were preserved, published, and valued was “our work” (7). All the things that Black women wrote, desired, and dreamed could fill hundreds of libraries. It was not a question of legitimacy. And it was never the preserve of one book, one publisher, or one writer to collect them all. In fact, the need to demonstrate to the literary establishment that there was more than just “one,” shed light on that establishment’s feigned appreciation of this literary tradition. They could not ignore it. But they could also not allow it to flourish on its own terms. The humanities after all, were an intellectual project whose object had already been clearly demarcated. The canon was there for a reason.
But no regime will ever be unopposed. Eventually, Black writers would declare that any war against a canon would necessarily be epistemic, an argument—through her editorship of Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us—that Morrison helped promote. So it was only in the context of intellectual warfare that new voices would emerge, new structures and institutions would be built, and new dreams could be written. It is necessary to state that the best of those dreams came from the pens of Black women across the world. And it is simultaneously a wonder and a somber note to read that all of these tensions and questions and possibilities could shape the tenure of a single editorship in the 1970s.
[1] Both Williams and Courtney Thorsson document Morrison’s sparse participation in the short-lived The Sisterhood. For her part, Bambara was part of several groups in Atlanta and beyond. See Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) and Linda Janet Holmes, A Joyous Revolt: Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and Activist (Praeger, 2014).
[2] Erica R. Edwards, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (NYU Press, 2021).
[3] Edwards, The Other Side of Terror, 185-211.
Josh Myers is the founding editor of A Gathering Together.
