Popular Reception of Toni Morrison's Beloved

I present a snapshot of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved from a personally experienced, particularly significant cultural moment in the public and academic discourse. I argue that Buppies (Black Urban Professionals), children of the turbulent sixties as readers, were meaningful precursors to the appropriately serious literary (aesthetic) reception of Morrison's work. In the case of the novel and the film, this popular reception was actually an embryonic response that bolstered an academic one, resulting in considerable overlap between these two interpretative communities. The initial popular reception propelled the text firmly into the arms of the academy, where it has settled into a long-lasting embrace. Pulling from the work of reception studies scholars like Patrocino Schweikart, this study connects the American Black Power Movement of the '60s and the subsequent emergence of Black Studies programs to the reception of the text and its film adaptation, as well as incorporating Morrison's own words on interpretative interaction between readers and her work.