Aging as an Epistemology of Sustainability: Reimagined Designs in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Aging as an Epistemology of Sustainability: Reimagined Designs in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Summary/Abstract: This essay highlights how Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) proposes aging as either consciousness or disengagement with sustainability. The narrative presents a revisitation of the historical development of America starting with the Great Depression in the 1890s, then the racial discrimination and the drought of the 1930s, leading to the National Environmental Act in 1970. This period refers to America’s aging that is marked with environmental damage, drastic decline of outputs, farm closures, stringent racial exclusion, and infectious diseases. Paradise contextualizes the nation’s depressive aging to visualize its translation in the American identity’s perception of somatic and mental aging and re-imagine an alternative philosophy of aging as awareness of continuities. As such, aging is presented in the narrative as a new recognition of the body in light of two opposing epistemologies of living. In particular, Paradise foregrounds one’s choice of either a subversive sustainable aging that activates human/non-human, natural, and communal connection or inherent non-sustainable aging that degenerates into a pathology of genetic and racial rift, environmental damage, and mortality. The symptomatic presence of such varied epistemologies of aging is extended into architectural aging and narratological aging. Paradise presents Ruby and the Convent as two exemplary communal designs that reflect the struggle of negotiating aging within the existing historical, social, and economic contexts. As such, the narrative reveals how unsustainable aging constructs a design of genetic isolation, detrimental memory, and reductive chronology. On the other hand, Paradise presents sustainable aging as the perception of a biophilic design that displays tendency of connectivity and renewal through its architectural features of regenerative biomimicry and biodiversity, circadian re-memory, and openness.

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