Marking Memory in Flesh: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

In this chapter, the dialogue between neuroscience and fiction meets its racialized challenge. Do the generalizations of neurological research into brains and bodies, mainly produced by white men, answer questions about racial bias? Morrison’s homage to “flesh that weeps, laughs” enables understanding of the horror of racial injustice in relation to Antonio Damasio’s theory of how “the nervous system, including its natural core, the brain, is located in its entirety within the territory of the body proper and is fully conversant with it.” While Morrison’s literary ancestors, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, each claimed Dostoevsky as a “literary father,” Morrison’s novel directs us toward a black feminist maternalist perspective, probing the body/mind dilemma further.