Beloved: Backgrounds

 Slavery

 Reconstruction

 History of Black discourse

 Slave Narratives and Beloved

 Source

b. the Triangle Trade:
 1. route: from England, with merchandise such as weapons, ammunition, metal, liquor, trinkets, and cloth, to the west Coast of Africa.  From Africa, with human cargo, to either West Indies or English colonies.  And then with agricultural products such as sugar back to England.
 2. "Middle Passage" (images)
 3. this trade is a source of wealth to tribal chiefs, to the shipping business, to plantation owners in the South, and to merchants and shipbuilders in the North.
 4. An estimated 8 to 15 million Africans reached the Americans from the 16th through the 19 century, with a peak of about 6 million arriving in the 18th century alone.

c. Historic and thematic relevance to Beloved: 
1. Morrison was inspired by the real life story of Margaret Garner, who she read about in a 19th century magazine while editing a historical novel. Garner also escaped from Kentucky to Cincinatti. When tracked down she attempted to murder all four of her children but only succeeded with one.   Fugitive Slave Acts; Underground Railroad.  

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d. Black women writers: 
-- feminism//Afro-American discourse: " We have both followed traditional patterns in the institutionalization of critical momvents, from our beginnings in a separatist cultural aesthetics, born out of participation in a protest movement, to a middle stage of professionalized focus on a specific text-milieu in an alliance with acadmeic literary theory; to an expanded and pluralistic critical field of expertise on sexual or racial difference.  Along with gay and post-Colonial critics, we share many critical metaphors, theories, and dilemmas, such as the notion of a double-voiced discourse, the imagery of the veil, the mask, or the closet; and the problem of autonomy vs. mimicry and civil disobedience. (Showalter 170)
  
--development of Black female writers: 
1) 19th century: e.g. Frances Harper & Jessie Fauset.  "Of necessity their language was outer directed rather than inwardly searching" (Christian 235)
  
2) 20th century until 1940's: e.g. Dorothy West, Iola Leroy, Neila Larsen, etc.  conflicting needs for "economic stability and 'feminine ideal'" (Christian 236)  "On the one hand, the writers try to prove that black women are women, that. . . they are beautiful (fair), pure, upper class, and would be nonagressive, dependent beings, if only racism did not exist.  At the same time, they appear to believe that if Afro-American women were to achieve the norm, they would lose important aspects of themselves"  (Christian 235).  
  
* exception: Zora Neale Hurston.  (exploration of the self as female and black.)
  
3) 1950's: self-definitions began--"the complex existence of the ordinary, dark-skinned woman, who is neither an upper-class matron committed to an ideal of woman that few could attain, . . . , nor a downtrodden victim, totally at the mercy of a hostile society" (238) .  [60's: Few novels by Afro-American women were published.]
  
4) early 70's:  the black communities critiqued for their embodying racist stereotypes.  (e.g. The Bluest Eye)
  
5) mid 70's: heroines as socio-political actors in the world, not isolated from their communities.  
  
6) Morison: focused on Black men as well as women.

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