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. Through her fictive narratives, Morrison offers ways of imagining the subject in history. This chapter explores the political and historical context of Morrison's life and discusses the concepts of cultural memory, testimony and trauma which will illuminate her concern with history and politics. Steering between the poles of survival and loss, mourning and reintegration, remembering and forgetting, Morrison's fiction foregrounds memory as a crucial site for dealing with the complex negotiations of personal and communal identity. Although Morrison's novels focus on the reclamation of erased or occluded history, they avoid any easy sense of reparation for past losses and oppression.