In a perfect world, one would expect books that have won Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer Prizes for Literature not to be on the 2023 list of banned books. But ours is not a perfect world and many of Toni Morrison’s books are on that list. While banning her books is not a completely novel concept in contemporaneous America, the list is getting ever longer. One particular event that propelled the current book-banning movement was Trump’s hysterical decrying of ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT) as “divisive and anti-American” in an Executive Order in 2020, thus necessitating the removal of diversity policies in government agencies and private companies. Not only had CRT never been part of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies, but there is evidence that Trump was ‘inspired’ to do this after watching a show on FoxNews the day before – in this way, becoming a great example of how ‘alternative facts’ are created.

CRT has been around for nearly 40 years, just never in schools, because it’s a social justice theory that is taught at universities at the graduate level to investigate systems of domination. However, in the wake of the reality created by Trump’s policies, school boards all over the country under the leadership of politicians like Gov. DeSantis of Florida have become increasingly active in taking books off school curricula that speak to topics like racism or gender in the widest sense – as all of Morrison’s text do. What better reason to revisit her writing?

This course will not only explore female community and empowerment in Morrison’s 1973 novel "Sula" set in a fictional town in Ohio in time after WW I, particularly through an intersectional lens. This class will extend that lens to Sue Monk Kidd’s 2001 "The Secret Life of Bees" set in 1964 South Carolina. This text also became a major motion picture starring, among others, Dakota Fanning and Alicia Keyes. We will be investigating how the authors and their characters in both books interconnect themes like cultural identity, concepts of beauty, femininity, racism, home and family, sexism, misogyny, and misogynoir, among others, reflecting on how these framing topics of female empowerment continue to be relevant today.