South Africa: How Toni Morrison's Legacy Plays Out in South Africa's Universities

analysis

I first encountered Toni Morrison during my undergraduate years at Rhodes University in South Africa where her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved (1987), was taught as part of an American Literature course.

It moved me in ways that no other academic account of transatlantic, African American slavery had. Beloved is set in the 19th century. It tells the story of a runaway slave who commits infanticide rather than seeing her child returned to slavery. As with Morrison's entire fictional oeuvre, the novel profoundly embodies and humanises black life.

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