African American roots
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
The reclamation of African American history has imaginatively propelled an unusual
number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the
neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars
of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s
Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the
United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet
for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to
retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified
by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire
spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s
most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).
Wood engraving of the 1856 Margaret Garner case
Wood engraving depicting the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had
escaped slavery killed her infant daughter rather than allow slave catchers to return her to slavery
in Kentucky. The case inspired the novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison; after a painting by
Thomas Noble; illustration in Harper's Weekly, 1867.
Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance
to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada
(1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In
Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial protagonist on a quest for emancipation from
slavery that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous
kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-
conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle
Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go
on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in
the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning
ideas about self and race.
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun
The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he
absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, a fictional
African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt
a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as
race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is
Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most
influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the
Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which a woman who had escaped her enslavers killed her
infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of
murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant
examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison
became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works
include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and,
with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).
In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is
generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in
which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s
difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American
literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the
“word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of
Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.
