As with many historical novels, one of the first questions that Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy raises concerns the relationship between two historical periods: the time in which the novel takes place and the time in which it was written. A Mercy tells the story of Florens, a young woman born into slavery in the last decades of the seventeenth century, severed from her mother and attempting to forge a life, an identity, and a future in the wilderness in what becomes the United States. The novel was published in 2008, the year the United States elected its first black president and its financial sector threw the globe into a year-long recession. While many readings of the novel (and of Morrison’s work more generally) focus on the connective tissue of history within a national context—specifically the way in which the trauma of America’s history of slavery and racism lingers and persists into our own age—I argue that we must widen our scope beyond the nation state in order to fully appreciate the significance of Morrison’s vision, which amounts to an archaeology of globalization. The early modern period and the early twenty-first century fall on either side of the period of the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, during which the rules governing the distribution of territories across the globe appeared relatively stable. By contrast, in the chaotic early colonial America or in the hyper-connected contemporary globalization, the power of national sovereignty is weaker and consequently the political conception of space becomes more chaotic and fluctuating. My reading focuses on Morrison’s representation of space in order to argue that A Mercy, in addition to everything else that can be said about it, can also be understood as a meditation on aesthetic and political world-making. By this, I do not mean that we must eschew questions of race or gender, but rather that in order to grasp the significance of Morrison’s representations of white supremacy and patriarchy, we must situate them in a larger historical and spatial context than the history of the United States. Motivated by the question of connections between the two historical periods in question, I analyze the missed connections and missing relationship between Florens and her mother in light of Morrison’s own theories of

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我成为荒野：托尼·莫里森的《慈悲与全球美国空间》

与许多历史小说一样，托尼·莫里森的小说《怜悯》提出的第一个问题涉及两个历史时期之间的关系：小说发生的时间和写作的时间。慈悲讲述了弗洛伦斯的故事，弗洛伦斯是一位在十七世纪最后几十年出生于奴隶制的年轻女性，她从母亲那里分离出来，试图在后来成为美国的旷野中塑造生活，身份和未来。这部小说于2008年出版，当年美国选出了第一位黑人总统，其财务部门扔了地球变成了一个长达一年的衰退。尽管许多小说（和莫里森的著作）的阅读都集中在国家背景下的结缔组织上，尤其是美国奴隶制和种族主义历史的创伤徘徊并持续到我们自己时代的方式，但我认为我们必须将我们的范围扩大到民族国家以外，以便充分理解莫里森远景的重要性，远景相当于全球化的考古学。早期的现代时期和二十一世纪初属于威斯特伐利亚国家主权制度的时期，在此期间，支配全球领土分布的规则显得相对稳定。相比之下，在混乱的早期殖民美国或高度联系的当代全球化中，国家主权的力量较弱，因此，空间的政治概念变得更加混乱和多变。我的阅读重点是莫里森对空间的表示，以便论证“仁慈”除了可以说的其他一切外，还可以理解为对美学和政治世界创造的沉思。因此，我并不是说我们必须回避种族或性别问题，而是为了掌握莫里森关于白人至上和父权制的代表性的意义，我们必须将其置于比其历史更大的历史和空间背景下。美国。受有关两个历史时期之间的联系的影响，