“They shoot the white girl first”. Violenza nell’Eden: Paradise di Toni Morrison

Abstract

The essay reads Morrison’s Paradise as a celebration of the birth of the United States, reinterpreting some of the founding myths of the United States from a different perspective, an African-American one. Morrison shows the dangers of a mythological construction of the past based on a single domineering perspective that silences possible parallel narrations. At the same time, he reveals the limits and the violence of a reading of the history of the New World in terms of Paradise or, according to the ideology of the Manifest Destiny, of the optimistic interpretation of the ‘conquest of the West’ and the triumphant founding mythology of the Pilgrims Fathers.