'Although fictional, Toni Morrison's Beloved is a work of Historical remembering' Discuss.
             Beloved is not an easy book to read. It is beautiful, frightening, surprising and enlightening. It tells a story of pain and suffering that is difficult to comprehend because we know of its scale, it tells a story of slavery. Beloved takes us deeper into an emotive subject that cannot be fully understood by perusing facts and figures or reading slave narratives, our only real first hand accounts of slaves which were written with an abolitionist agenda. Over the years since these narratives, historians have used various different approaches to tackling the history of Afro-American slaves.
             These approaches have been used to further dehumanise slaves. Some in a blatantly racist way, others in a more sinister pseudoscientific fashion. In addition the well meaning but patronising manner historians have on occasion used devalues the individual stories of heroism with sweeping statements about the treatment that slaves were subjected to. Others have attempted to right the discrepancy between the real Afro-American cultural history which has been erased by years of racism and the stories which are either watered down, sanitised versions of the truth, or blatant lies that conceal terrible acts. Over the past hundred years the pendulum has slowly swung the other way. There has been writing that has portrayed slaves as hero's but in an attempt to counter the earlier racist attitudes this can go too far, losing sight of the truth and the need to portray Afro-American culture as it really is and was. In Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved Marilyn Sanders Mobley explains how Morrison herself feared the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s was not addressing the underlying root of the cultural instability
             'Morrison herself feared the movement propounded a kind of historical erasure of denial of ...