SOURCE: Grewal, Gurleen. “Prospero's Spell and the Question of Resistance: Tar Baby.” In Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison, pp. 79-95. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Grewal asserts that Morrison's Tar Baby examines African-American struggles over issues of identity in a postmodern, postcolonial world.

And neither world thought the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Ninety-five per cent of my people poor ninety-five per cent of my people black ninety-five per cent of my people dead you have heard it all before O Leviticus O Jeremiah           O Jean-Paul Sartre 

and now I see that these modern palaces have grown out of the soil, out of the bad habits of their crippled owners the Chrysler stirs but does not produce cotton the Jupiter purrs but does not...