Part 6: Speculative Futures
What if an archive is not where we go for answers, but a site that generates ongoing questions? What if the archive does not clarify a past, but instead illuminates an unrealized future? What if we read the archive for impressions, incomplete gestures, and fragments? What if its grammatical structure is not the past tense, but is instead what the critic Saidiya Hartman describes as the subjunctive, “a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities”?
“Speculative Futures” traces the projects, character arcs, and creative dreams that only live in the archive. Although most of these projects never materialized as final productions or publications, they bear witness to Toni Morrion’s always capacious imagination, to her commitment to creative risk taking and experimentation. But perhaps most importantly, they bear out a theory of the archive that Morrison’s published novels also express, one that is recursive, iterative, and always open-ended.
Tar Baby Screenplay
1983
Princeton University Library Special Collections
Morrison was interested in adapting her 1981 novel Tar Baby as a screenplay. These early versions by both Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara house an alternative life for Tar Baby and register Morrison’s investment in film and cinema that would endure over the course of her career.
“A Play”
undated
Princeton University Library Special Collections
This three page outline for a one-act, one-scene “Play” was likely drafted as Morrison was writing The Bluest Eye. Set in a “backyard,” the play is cast with nature’s elements. While it is not clear whether or not this was a writing exercise, a creative experiment, or a portion of a longer project that was intended for production, its presence does invite us to ask, what would Morrison’s early career have looked like if she prioritized drama?
“Recitatif”
undated
Princeton University Library Special Collections
When “Recitatif” appeared in the 1983 anthology Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amina and Amiri Baraka, it was the first and only time that Morrison published a short story. With its refusal to racially mark its characters, the short story is also an exercise in what she would later describe as “summoning and eclipsing the racial gaze,” an imperative that would get elaborated in her 1998 novel Paradise. Yet, before publishing it as a short story, “Recitatif” was conceived of as a play. In these selections from hand and typed written drafts we see Morrison moving between a four and three act play, and rearranging key scenes and settings.
For many, Beloved (1987) is their entry point to the world of Toni Morrison. For the novel, Morrison moved out and through the 1856 trial of Margaret Garner, an enslaved mother who, after escaping, was arrested for killing one of her children and attempting to kill the others. Since its publication, Beloved has become a touchstone for scholars of slavery and an urtext in fields like Black studies, history, legal studies, and American literature. Beloved is also regularly taught in high school and college courses and is included in book club reading lists; it is the work for which Morrison is perhaps best known. And yet the Beloved that we have come to know is shadowed by many alternate lives. Drawn from notes and drafts, these objects offer glimpses into the Beloved that might have been, the lines of inquiry that Morrison pursued but didn’t commit to.
Exhibited Items Pertaining to Beloved
Beloved’s Possible Endings, undated
“The Last Word”, 1987 [Typed on 81/2 x 11 paper]
Notes and Drafts for Beloved (3 pages), undated
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Princeton University Library Special Collections
"The Site of Memory"
1986
Princeton University Library Special Collections
