In Search Of Mothers' Home

Since the 1970s, there has been a steady outpouring of African-American writing. Toni Morrison is one of those writers who have played active roles in making black voices heard. In novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, she gives life to an essential aspect of American reality. Her fifth novel— Beloved, was a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and has been studied through different approaches. The author of this article uses cultural approach to analyze Morrison's employment of African-American traditions in Beloved. The thesis maintains that Morrison writes about the mother-daughter relationship and the ways of naming in Beloved. She also employs the African-American oral traditions in the novel to reconstruct the African-American experience. The author argues that Morrison has successfully created a double-voiced text which African-American readers can decode while white readers believe they have understood as well. Morrison's deliberate use of the similarity between western literary traditions and African-American traditions is her strategy to preserve cultural identity of her marginalized people and to find a healing solution to the problems confronting her people. Therefore, the novel demonstrates Morrison's efforts to make her fiction both artistically and politically engaged. The author holds that Beloved is an example for us Chinese as how to maintain our cultural heritage and identity in the time of globalization.