"Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been ‘discovered’ actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining ourselves. We are not Isak Dinesen’s ‘aspects of nature’, nor [Joseph] Conrad’s unspeaking. We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participant in our own experience of those with whom we have come in contact. We are not, in fact, ‘Other’. We are choices."

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                              -Toni Morrison, “Black Matter(s)”