By the first week of February, Herman Beavers’ newest book is slated to hit the shelves. Years in the making, “Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison” takes a unique approach to spotlighting the decorated writer’s novels that have strong connections to the South, such as “A Mercy,” “Home,” and “Love.”

“I’m really trying to think about Morrison’s interest in the ways that space becomes place,” says Beavers, a Penn professor of English and Africana studies. “I’m especially intrigued by the recurrence of what I call ‘horizontal placemaking,’ which we see for the first time in ‘Beloved,’ but which recurs in some of her subsequent works. I’m looking at very practical iterations of geography. Thinking about streets, neighborhoods, communities, about how she has always deployed these configurations of community that lead people to feel a sense of either alienation or belonging.”

Take Morrison’s “Jazz,” for instance. Based in Harlem, N.Y., in 1926, it tells the story of black southerners migrating to the area “in ways they hadn’t been able to do before,” says Beavers.

“It was right before radio becomes a prevalent technology,” he says. “I’m trying to think about how Morrison represents how peoples’ relationships change as they live in this place with a higher population density, and popular media, and cultural forms coming at them. … I wanted to think about how that impacted peoples’ relationships on the ground, and how she views this new circumstance as a precarious space, ripe for betrayal and loss.”

In his book, Beavers also ties in how Morrison’s novels engaged with what he calls “political imaginary.”

“I think we tend to underestimate, or not even discuss directly, how great a political thinker Morrison is in her novels,” he says.

Beavers will discuss the book, its meaning, who it was written for, how he came to write it, and additional details about Morrison’s style and impact at a Lightbulb Café lecture at World Cafe Live Upstairs on Tuesday, Jan. 23. An audience Q&A session will follow. The talk, which begins at 6 p.m. and is free and open to the public, is also part of the African-American Resource Center’s MLK Symposium.

Beavers says he hopes attendees who aren’t as familiar with Morrison’s novels will be motivated to read some of her works.

“I am always happy to have conversations with people from the community about literature and ideas, and this talk is an opportunity to do that,” he says.

The Jan. 23 Lightbulb Café, produced by Penn’s Office of University Communications and School of Arts and Sciences, is the first of the series for the Spring 2018 semester. Additional Lightbulb Cafés, which focus on social science, arts, and humanities, as well as Science Cafés, are scheduled on Tuesdays through June.

Topics include “Love Hurts: Heartbreak in the Ancient World,” “Poverty in the American South,” “Nudging Women to Run,” “Water, Water Everywhere,” and “After the Higgs Boson: What’s Next for Fundamental Physics at the Large Hadron Collider?”

Find more info on the Penn Science and Lightbulb Café website.