INTRODUCTION

My experience as a mum and an international student has impacted my choice of theme in this Scholarly Reader's Guide (SRG). I miss family and friends in Nigeria, however my experience of temporary disconnection from home has helped me tremendously, this is because I am able to merge my personal experience of longing and temporary disconnection from home with characters in Toni Morrison's Beloved, one of the texts we read in my black fantastic class. I have thought a lot about enslaved  mothers, I wonder about how they felt when their children were yanked from them, and taken to places they don't know. Also, I think a lot about the emotional and psychological stress their desire for freedom costs.

Titled “Mothering Slaves,” this SRG provides you with resources that will help you engage in serious intellectual conversations about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Focused on motherhood as a contested space, I will provide you with digital resources that will help you think through the ways that slavery complicates motherhood. I hope to help you see how hard it was for enslaved mothers to perform or not perform their motherly duties and how easy or hard it was for the women to keep their hopes of  freedom alive, first as individuals and then as mothers. 

While the mini archive section provides historical contents and sociopolitical tools for understanding Beloved, the literature review section provides a brief review of scholarly works on the subject. The  visualization section provides digital resources for better analysis of the text. 

I am about to make you think deeply about slavery and motherhood, let's take a leap!