Characters as victims of slavery: A black feminist analysis of Beloved by Toni Morrison

This dissertation examines Toni Morrison?s novel Beloved to reconstruct the traumatized history of the African-American people, and to constitute the notions of race, history, and community without sexual difference. Beloved commemorates the struggle for selfhood that has been taken from them by the White hegemony; the overwhelming historical, political, economical, physical and psychological force. Lost historical and racial memories are recovered through the daughter?s desire for reunion and reconciliation with the mother. This dissertation presents how slavery works on different levels- not only historical and factual but also symbolic- while it follows the same pattern in its processes of dehumanization. It presents a Black Feminist evaluation as a theory that aims to deconstruct the racist and sexist implications against the Black female voice that is omitted and negated in the dominantly White Western Literature.Key Words: Slavery, Black Feminism , Sufferings, Selfhood, Hope