Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
June 19th, or Juneteenth, celebrates the day that the country’s last slaves were freed. In this short video, NPR chronicles the final Civil War battle leading up to the final emancipation in Texas on June 19th, 1865 – two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation became official. In the years leading up to emancipation, slave narratives began to be published, the best known being the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Today we have neo-slave narratives – novels about slavery written by contemporary authors. See below for reviews of today’s most celebrated neo-slave narratives.
BELOVED by Toni Morrison
Beloved not only won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1987, it was also proclaimed “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years” by the New York Times book review in 2006. With a story spanning generations, where brutality is vividly represented, Beloved paints a picture of slavery and reconstruction that will affect even the most hardened readers. So if you haven’t read it yet, you should – watching the Oprah movie doesn’t count.
“We experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange, both at its best – which wasn’t very good – and at its worst, which was as bad as can be imagined.” – New York Times book review (1987)
THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones
Another Pulitzer Prize winner and winner of the National Book Critics Circle award in 2004, The Known World explores the peculiar relationship between master and slave – in this case, the relationship between a freed slave who becomes master to slaves of his own.
“The Known World ventures into previously uncovered places and shines a light on them that is at once blindingly bright and surpassingly warm.” – The Washington Post book review (2003)
KINDRED by Octavia Butler
Classified as science ficiton, Kindred was published in 1979 and tells the story of a contemporary African American woman who is transported multiple times from 1976 Los Angeles to the antebellum South. Butler once told Publishers Weekly, “I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.” Frequently taught in black-studies courses, the book is known for its riveting, carefully researched account of the slave experience.
“Kindred is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery and racial dilemmas, then and now.” – Los Angeles Herald Examiner review
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