Racial Oppression in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s Meridian

Abstract

The history of African Americans is full of atrocities and crippled experiences of racial oppression. Naturally, the literature by African Americans deals with the vulnerable and painful experiences of racial hegemony, burden of history and problem of identity. African American women writers portray various types of oppression and atrocities raised on African American people in general and African American women in particular. Toni Morrison’s novels explore the whole world of the African Americans with their tears, pangs and dreams. She considers racism as a primary obstacle in the life of African Americans. Her novel, Beloved offers a powerful and horrifying narrative on slavery, a byproduct of racism where the white masters treat the blacks as slaves. Whereas Alice Walker, one of the significant voices in the women literary tradition of African American literature, explores on the sufferings and humiliation in the lives of African Americans on the account of race, gender and class. The present paper aims at analyzing Morrison’s Beloved and Walker’s Meridian as to show how both the writers have some similarity as well as dissimilarity in the portrayal of the oppressed sections.