Through literature, film, and other media, the Writing Injustice Book Group invites the Guilford community to explore the issues of race and inequality that shape our history and our world.
Conversations will be led and facilitated by Hazel V. Carby, the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Yale University, and Donna Daniels, Ph.D., CEO of Possibility Labs, and Cultural Anthropologist.
A Mercy (2008) by Toni Morrison
A Mercy, published in 2008, by Nobel Prizewinner, Toni Morrison is her deepest excavation into America’s history. Set in the 17th century Morrison immerses her readers in a time when the South had just passed laws that “separated and protected all whites from all others forever,” and the North had begun persecuting people accused of witchcraft.
An American farmer Jacob Vaark, thinks he’s creating an earthly paradise, but Lina, his Native American slave, feels as if she’s “entering the world of the damned.” European settlers may have believed that they were creating an American Eden, but their paradise depended upon the forced transportation of enslaved people from Africa and resulted in the near extermination of the native population.
Copies of A Mercy will be available to borrow at the Reference Desk.
Additional titles in the Writing Injustice Book Discussion series include:
- The Yellow House (2019) by Sarah M. Broom (Wednesday, January 15 at 7pm)
- The Old Drift (2019) by Namwali Serpell (Wednesday, February 19 at 7pm)
- Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Wednesday, March 19 at 7pm)
This program is free and open to all.
Please register.