The body of work that Toni Morrison has produced is powerfully engaged with questions of history, memory and trauma. This book explores the way in which Morrison's novels function as a form of cultural memory and how, in their engagement with the African American past, they testify to historical trauma. Writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison continued the tradition that Du Bois's vision of haunted historical memory has bequeathed. Through her fictive narratives, Morrison offers ways of imagining the subject in history. By shaping cultural memory of the past, her novels offer readers different ways of relating to the past and the future and therefore of 'being in history'. In Morrison's view, history is never over, never simply in the past. Its repercussions and traumatic consequences generate the effects of the present and continue to shape it. Without knowledge of that history, the present can be only poorly understood. Morrison's focus on literature as a way of making the past available to memory recalls Freud's focus on the puzzling nature of dream work among the traumatised. As much as Morrison's novels constitute a form of cultural memory, then, they also disclaim the possibility of entirely transforming painful, unassimilated history into satisfactorily integrated narrative.