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Ghosts of Liberalism: Morrison's Beloved and the Moynihan Report

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James Berger
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Abstract

In focusing the novel Beloved on Sethe's forced infanticide, Toni Morrison places social and familial trauma at the center of American discourses on race. This emphasis opposes two forms of the denial of trauma that have characterized American politics since the late 1960s—neoconservative denial of the continuing effects of institutional racism and the New Left and black-nationalist denial of violence within African American communities. Beloved invokes an essentially liberal position of the sort that culminated and largely ended in the Moynihan report of 1965. But Morrison corrects the errors of this form of liberalism by insisting on the agency and autonomy of African American culture and on the positive roles of women.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 111 , Issue 3 , May 1996 , pp. 408 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1996

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