Introduction Weaving Texts and Memories Around Toni Morrison s Beloved.

Abstract

In this introduction, Michel Feith problematizes the complex relation between writing and the history of slavery by focusing on two case studies that reconfigure this relation: an examination of the Memorial for the Abolition of Slavery, inaugurated in Nantes, France in 2012, and a triangulation between Toni Morrison s Beloved, and Saidiya Hartman s Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Lose Your Mother (2007). What common ground seems to emerge from these two case studies memory as a sort of compromise formation in the monument, and the varying mixes of ob-jectivity and empathy in the texts is a sense of haunting, accompanied by an always compromised endeavor to lay at rest the ghosts of the Middle Passage.