SOURCE: Gwin, Minrose. “Her Shape, His Hand: The Spaces of African American Women in Go Down, Moses.” In New Essays on “Go Down, Moses,” edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, pp. 73-100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Gwin examines the physical and metaphorical spaces of African American women in Go Down, Moses.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison has argued that Africanism is essential to the definition of Americanness and American modernity, as well as to the major themes and presumptions of the white North American literary imagination. In particular, she believes that the white literary imagination has been the ideological site of “the manipulation of the Africanist narrative (that is, the story of a black person, the experience of being bound and/or rejected) as a means of meditation—both safe and risky—on one's own humanity” (Morrison, Playing 53). Morrison...