Agenda

SEMINAR | On Toni Morrison's Post-Evental Narrations

5 June 2026, 2 PM CEST
Aula Mazzariol, Malcanton Marcorà

Lindsay Parkhowell
PhD dell'Università di Basilea

Abstract:
This presentation examines how Toni Morrison develops a form of post-evental narration capable of sustaining historical intelligibility after stable eventality has broken down. Revisiting Hayden White's account of the "Modernist event" in Figural Realism, I suggest that White ultimately preserves the event as the privileged mediator between lived temporality and historical narration, even when modern catastrophe renders its representation increasingly difficult. Contemporary climate catastrophe, however, presents a different problem. Climate tipping systems, planetary boundary transgressions, and distributed forms of fossil-colonial causality no longer appear as singular events retrospectively organizing history into intelligible form, but as pervasive conditions saturating historical reality in advance. The resulting crisis is therefore not merely one of representation but of historical emplotment itself.

Reading Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise by the American author Toni Morrison, I argue that each novel develops a distinct strategy for narrating the dissolution of eventality. Crucially, despite the staged dissolution of the central event of each novel, Morrison does not allow her narrative to end in despair, but rather extends it in order to pose central historiographical and literary questions, such as: How can narration continue after the event no longer provides a stable ground for historical meaning? What forms of memory, relation, justice, and collective life become possible when catastrophe cannot be resolved into either closure or redemption? And how might such literary forms help us think about contemporary ecological crises, whose causes and consequences are similarly distributed, ongoing, and resistant to evental narration?

The event is a part of a series of colloquia on eco-critical relations in planetary times, which interrogates how planetarity requires new forms of historical and affective imagination. How do narratives sustain relations between individuals, communities, and environments under precarious conditions? What kinds of justice, responsibility, and care become possible when the causes and consequences of catastrophe are unevenly distributed across generations, species, and geographies? And how do alternate forms of collectivity haunt the present as ethical, ecological, or relational possibilities?