Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Concepts of "home" - whether a physical place, community, or relationship - are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives - psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories - Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. This work’s accomplishment lies in its considerable capacity to make us feel that we are each not only resident but co-owner of, and collectively accountable for, this land we call home.In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. It’s precisely by committing unreservedly to the first that she’s able to transcend the circumscribed audience it might imply. Part of Morrison’s longstanding greatness resides in her ability to animate specific stories about the black experience and simultaneously speak to all experience. revelations read like in-text SparkNotes. At times, Home displays its meanings with all the subtlety of a zoot-suiter. the book’s most powerful proposition: that there is no such thing as individual pathology. Threaded through the story are reminders of our country’s vicious inhospitality toward some of its own. What kind of selfhood is it possible to possess when we come from a spiritually impoverished home, one that fails to concede, let alone nourish, each inhabitant’s worth? This is the question Morrison asks, and while exploring it through the specific circumstances of Frank Money, she raises it in a broader sense.
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