African-American Home and Family Issues in Beloved by Toni Morrison and of Love and Dust by Ernest James Gaines

Abstract

This paper studies the problematic of home and family among the African American community in Beloved by Toni Morrison and Of Love and Dust by Ernest Gaines. Set in the 1850s southern America, both narratives relates the systems of slavery and racial discrimination that condemned the African American community, in many ways, in conditions which denied them a true home within the south of the U.S., which paved the way for the disintegration of family structure splitting thus parents from children, husbands from wives. However, it is argued that there is still hope for change.