Since Toni Morrison’s passing in 2019, there has been a notable surge of scholarly works examining the Noble-prize-winning author’s legacy. Lawrie Balfour’s meticulously conceived Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom stands out as the first comprehensive study of Morrison’s political philosophy, making it essential reading for those familiar with Morrison’s rich oeuvre and newcomers eager to understand her influence. Balfour’s primary objective is to show how Morrison’s writings puncture the American progress narrative and its grip on the white American political imagination by exposing the “unspeakable human costs” of that so-called flight from bondage into freedom (109).

Balfour reads Morrison as a Black feminist philosopher of freedom, whose contributions as a public intellectual, cultural critic, and novelist urge us to critically evaluate the meaning of personal and collective freedom “in a democratic society founded on both the defense of liberty and the right to enslave” (5). Balfour’s project is grounded in the contention that Morrison’s approach does not merely add to the existing repository of liberation theories but fundamentally unsettles abstract (white and masculinist) notions of freedom untethered from lived experience. Instead of focusing on what freedom “is,” Morrison’s work explores how freedom is inhabited, concretely enacted, and intimately experienced in quotidian life, advancing an expansive vision of freedom that is “at once expressly political and more-than-political” (8).

One of the most striking features of Balfour’s book is her deliberate “trespass” across scholarly boundaries, an approach which aligns with her trenchant critique of conventional political theory. By adroitly integrating literary analysis with insights from an impressive array of critical frameworks, including political philosophy, democratic theory, and anti- and postcolonial and Black feminist scholarship, Balfour explicates Morrison’s literary universe in relation to various dimensions of freedom: language, sovereignty, modernity, home, flight/fugitivity, sovereignty, responsibility, and beauty. These explorations prompt a reckoning with prevailing (Western) accounts of freedom, and the constellation of political concepts with which they are entangled, by prioritizing the voices of those who have borne their violations and violences.

Balfour begins with sustained attention to Morrison’s public-intellectual reflections on the generative power of “word-work” in the wake of racial slavery and dispossession. By reading a judicious selection of Morrison’s essays and lectures alongside anti and postcolonial thinkers from Aimé Césaire to Fanon, Balfour shows how Morrison engages with and reconfigures the “vexed terms” of the “imperial tongue”—as a practice of freedom and world-building project. For Morrison, this double-edged work of engendering an alternative American English that retains racial specificity without reproducing the violence of racist hierarchy hinges upon the concept of writerly sovereignty. Balfour underscores Morrison’s commitment to avoiding minstrelsy, voyeurism, or explaining Black life to a white readership.

This refusal to cater to the white gaze underpins Morrison’s effort to take history into her hands. Her novels are penned as memorials for “lives unrecorded by official history” and as tools for imagining “worlds that are not yet in existence but might be” (35). At the same time, Balfour reminds us, Morrison is acutely aware of the limits of authorial control. Rather than viewing her readers as passive recipients of political prescriptions, morally instructive lessons, or more “accurate” versions of master narratives, Morrison views her literary practice as a collaborative venture with her audience. Her characters’ “choiceless choices” and the unexpected solidarities they forge, in the absence of political freedom, challenge readers to “see” creative forms of defiance and quieter ways of carving out freedom—even those laced with shame and terror (138). By “altering the sensibilities” that sustain power structures designed to neglect, dehumanize, and dis-member, Morrison encourages readers to reject the “racial house” and actively participate as co-conspirators in reimagining anti-racist forms of freedom (180).

But what does it look like to tell “political stories in an intimate register” (2), and how might political theorists excavate these rich sites as part of their own “word-working” praxis? In chapters 2–5, Balfour demonstrates how Morrison’s novels allows readers to observe how freedom and unfreedom are registered in the interior and embodied lives of those forgotten people “no one inquired of” (7). Chapter 2 juxtaposes the seventeenth-century landscape of A Mercy (2008) with the 1920s post-abolition life of Jazz (1992), highlighting how white predation, Black dispossession, and colonial conquest shaped the underside of freedom before and after the abolition of legal racial slavery. Chapter 3 traces Morrison’s portrayal of the tensions between Black mobility—unrestrained, fugitive, and forced modes of movement, and desires for situated-ness—homemaking, sanctuary, and grounded-ness, within a white supremacist polity. Balfour shows how Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and Home (2012) reveal these complexities of fugitivity and the uneven (often gendered) distribution of the possibility and cost of flights toward freedom. Chapter 4 delves into the paradoxical relationship between freedom and responsibility by exploring Morrison’s depiction of Black un/motherhood in Beloved (1987) and Sula (1973). Balfour reads the portrayal of infanticide in Beloved through Morrison’s 1971 essay on women’s liberation to question the meaning of “personal responsibility” for those whose decision-making capacities have been disavowed, and fugitive practices effaced. The final chapter compares Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) with Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), focusing on Morrison’s Black feminist orientation toward ugliness and beauty, and the self-loathing and devastation incited by a violently racialized social order.

Morrison’s Nobel Lecture famously asserted, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”Footnote ¹ Balfour’s richly edifying book evinces Morrison as a revolutionary political thinker whose word-work impels us to confront the virulent injustices at the heart of nation’s founding so that they might be redeemed for struggles in the present, and to refuse “freedom dreams” predicated on racial subjugation, violent policing, and borders. While some might seek a more explicit connection between Morrison’s articulations of freedom that resonate with contemporary racial justice movements, Balfour remains faithful to Morrison’s style of placing deliberation “in the reader’s hands” (101). Rather than tell us what is to be done, Balfour offers her project as a deft exemplar for how to mine Black literature in ways that reorient democratic inquiries toward racial slavery, colonialism, and Black feminist thought.

Balfour’s project repeatedly underscores how Morrison’s political imagination counters what Saidiya Hartman describes as “the violence of abstraction.”Footnote ² By vividly depicting the situated experiences, and freedom struggles of enslaved and colonized subjects, particularly Black women and girls. Morrison’s work compels readers to reckon with the dehumanizing rationality of the hunters and linger with the insurgent rationality of the prey. In a parallel move, Balfour prompts her readers to reconsider political theory’s conventional lexicon, grand narratives, and disembodied modes of interpreting political life. Through this lens, Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom is a landmark study in how infidelity to traditional canons, and keener attention to how the world is being storied by our “philosophical outsiders,” can push us toward more genuine review of past, present, and future possibilities of freedom.