Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison

In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives-psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories-Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity.