Four-day event celebrates 70 years of Toni Morrison’s Cornell legacy

It has been 70 years since novelist, editor and literary critic Toni Morrison earned a master of arts degree at Cornell, in 1955, with a thesis on Virginia Woolf's and William Faulker's treatment of the alienated.

A four-day event featuring films, panels, workshops, the unveiling of a mural and other activities will celebrate the 70th anniversary of her degree, life and work. "Toni Morrison: Literature and Public Life" will take place Sept. 18-21.

The symposium is free and open to the public; registration is required and is open until Sept. 8. Visit the Toni Morrison Collective website to register.

The Toni Morrison Collective, a group of Cornell faculty and librarians, is organizing the event in partnership with the Toni Morrison Society, a group of scholars formed under the American Literature Association.

"The symposium gives us a chance to reflect on a topic that was the subject of Toni Morrison's first A. D. White Professor-at-Large lecture in 1988: literature and public life," said Anne V. Adams, professor emerita of Africana studies and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S)and chair of the Toni Morrison Collective.

In that lecture, Morrison said: "Literature allows us - no, demands of us - the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons. And doing so is far more necessary than it has ever been … . As a simultaneous apprehension of human character in time, in context, in space, in metaphorical and expressive language, it organizes the disorienting influence of an excess of realities: heightened, virtual, mega, hyper, cyber, contingent, porous and nostalgic. Finally, it can project an alleviated future."

Adams said the various events of the weekend will give participants "an opportunity to reflect - through diverse disciplines and media - on the prescient validity of those ideas in our own time."

The symposium opens Sept. 18, 3:30 p.m., at the A.D. White House, with conversation between filmmaker Louis Massiah '77, A.D. White Professor-at-Large, and Mendi Obadike, professor of performing and media arts (A&S) and Keith Obadike, professor of art in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker, will appear as part of the Zalaznick Reading Series, at Sept. 18, 5 p.m., in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium. The evening will end with a film screening of "The Foreigner's Home," a documentary about a 2006 monthlong series of arts performances that Morrison curated at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The film event will include a commentary by Massiah.

Sept. 20-21 are full of panel discussions, conversations and roundtables. Highlights include a presentation by Autumn Womack, associate professor of English and African American studies at Princeton and co-curator of a 2023 exhibition "Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory," which featured archival objects from the Toni Morrison Papers at Princeton, where Morrison taught from 1989-2006. The presentation will take place Sept. 19, 2 p.m., Africana Studies and Research Center.

"The exhibit offered just a small sample of the riches in the Princeton archive, but it was still overwhelming to see manuscript and typescript pages from all of Morrison's major works," said Roger Gilbert, professor of Literatures in English, who co-teaches a popular class with Adams each year on a Morrison novel. "I was especially struck by the fact that a number of those pages had charred edges, evidence of a house fire that almost destroyed Morrison's archive. We're very fortunate that so much of that material survived the fire, while bearing visible reminders of it."

Farah Jasmine Griffin, professor of English and comparative literature atColumbia University, will give a talk titled "The Gleam of a Brighter Horizon: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Toni Morrison," as the Reuben A. and Cheryl Casselberry Munday Distinguished Lecture. It takes place Sept. 19, 5-6 p.m., multipurpose room, Africana Studies and Research Center.

Two Morrison-inspired tableaux that will hang in Toni Morrison Hall will be unveiled Sept. 20, 12:30 p.m., Toni Morrison Hall, North Campus. The artwork was created by students at Ithaca High School and students in Brooklyn, New York.

Morrison's time at Cornell had a lasting impact on her life, Adams said. More than a decade after her graduation, Morrison wrote to her thesis advisor, Prof. Robert Elias.

"I am going to take another liberty and tell you now what I would never have dared to say, or even dared to know, when I was in Ithaca," Morrison wrote. "Cornell was the first place in my life where I was treated as a human being … I was welcomed there into the human race and, good or ill, I have been there ever since. Now, that, I think, was progress."

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.