Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a Neo-Slave Narrative

Abstract

Slave narratives, written widely during the nineteenth century, are considered the first genre of African-American literature. These narratives acted as an opportunity for the slaves to exercise their right of freedom of expression. But it has often been noted that such narratives were incomplete or undone because “there was a careful selection of instances” that would be recorded and a “careful rendering of those that they chose to describe”. The experience of slavery was often shaped to make it “palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it”. This means that working to end slavery sometimes required to mute the sharing of details of one’s life and race But no more. A neo slave narrative is an African-American genre which investigates the history of slavery and reworks the nineteenth century slave narrative tradition. In Timothy Spaulding’s words, it is a form that “forces us to question the ideologies embedded within realistic representation of slavery in traditional history and historical fiction”.