Toni Morrison’s Political Vision- Schmitt, Mouffe, and the Labor of Political Survival

• In Event: Critical Theory, Race, and Literature

Abstract

This paper explores Toni Morrison’s Home as a critical intervention in political theory, offering an alternative vision of justice that grapples with and reconfigures the normative boundaries of liberal proceduralism. Engaging the work of Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe, I argue that Morrison reframes the political not through sovereignty or moral consensus, but through the lived, racialized conditions of care, abandonment, and survival. While Schmitt theorizes exclusion from above—through sovereign decision and the friend-enemy distinction—Morrison reveals its consequences from below, illuminating how black life is continually shaped by the structural absence of legal protection and recognition. Placing Morrison in conversation with Schmitt and Mouffe, this paper develops a new vocabulary for political belonging—one grounded not in institutional redemption or liberal inclusion, but in the agonistic labor of building life, dignity, and justice amid the enduring structures of racial violence.

Author

• Columbus De'Marcus Pruitt, Brown University