By escaping Eurocentrism — that is, the Caucasian point of view — Morrison has liberated and expanded literature in the same way that Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Bill Robinson, Josephine Baker, Judith Jamison, and Spike Lee liberated and expanded music, dance, and film. Critic Dan Cryer describes Morrison's novels depicting African-American life as "fluid and lyrical, as full of sorrow and gusto as the blues, at once eloquent laments for her people and tributes to their staying power." The refusal to quit, to knuckle under, or to cower in self-doubt makes her characters memorable and, more important, admirable.
For Morrison, merging into the psyche of the character produces a mystical "something" — an awareness that approaches a séance, an out-of-self experience akin to communing with spirits of a former time and place. Her ability to identify with and actualize fictional creations has earned her the nickname "conjure woman." Her belief that such expression draws on a collective consciousness of music and oral traditions — of stories that exist in a fragile, ephemeral state because they have yet to appear on paper — leads her to think of her art as political. Because she writes from an almost devout concern for the characters who people her imaginary landscapes, Morrison produces a quality of fiction that transcends race, gender, social or political circumstance, and time.
