In Search of 'The Clearing': Blackness and Being in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Considering today’s sociopolitical climate and the advent of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, I hope to continue my research on the literature of Morrison and other Black women/queer men writers and how their fiction can serve not only as a source of escape for Black Americans, but also as a site of theorizing about the possibility of Black life and true Black freedom, and of imagining alternative modes of Black existence, of various radical elsewheres.