Namwali Serpell Presents On Morrison, in Conversation with Vinson Cunningham
Author Namwali Serpell and New Yorker critic Vinson Cunningham explore Toni Morrison's literary legacy, examining what her work still teaches contemporary readers.
Why we picked this
Serpell's literary criticism has the rare quality of making you want to immediately reread the books she writes about — her take on Morrison, with Cunningham's eye for cultural context, should be a rich evening for anyone who cares about American fiction.
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian-American writer whose novel “The Old Drift” — a multigenerational epic spanning Zambia’s colonial and postcolonial history — established her as one of the most ambitious literary voices of her generation. Her critical writing is equally distinctive: she approaches literary analysis not as taxonomy but as an act of close attention, bringing the same sensory precision she deploys in her fiction to the work of other writers. Her engagement with Toni Morrison’s novels promises something other than tribute or survey.
Morrison’s body of work — “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon,” “The Bluest Eye,” “Jazz,” and the rest — represents one of the most sustained and formally inventive examinations of Black American life in the history of the novel. She transformed what literary fiction could do with memory, trauma, and the interior lives of people history had long ignored. Twenty-five years after her Nobel Prize and several years after her death, her work is more widely taught than ever, which makes the question of what it still teaches — rather than what we already know about it — the more interesting starting point.
Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker, covers culture with a particular attention to how art and moral life intersect. His dual background as a former White House staffer and a working critic gives his writing a quality of engagement with power that suits a conversation about Morrison, whose fiction was always, among other things, about who holds power over whose stories. The Judson Memorial Church setting, with its own history as a venue for radical cultural and political life, suits the evening well.