"Own Yourself, Woman": Toni Morrison s A Mercy, Early Modernity, and Property

Abstract

This study puts Toni Morrison s novel A Mercy in conversation with John Locke s Two Treatises of Government (1689), re-visiting the Treatises in light of recent Black Studies interventions in the topos of Western subjectivity. While situating both the Treatises and the scholarly engagement with them in their historical moment, it develops a post-slavery reading of the early modern conceptions of individual liberty and property by means of A Mercy s characters.