托尼．莫里森的《天堂》（1998年）是對非裔美國人歷史的透徹表現，它探討了我將在這部作品的介紹中描述的一些主題。主要是，我將在本文中仔細研究《天堂》中描繪的最重要的主題之一——黑人歷史以及美國文化背景下的政治和社會發展。對於激進分子莫里森來說，改革的禮物同樣重要，我們可以將她對「當前」非裔美國人歷史的看法一直延伸到奴隸制時代，因為正是在這個時代，非裔美國人的現代歷史才真正開始，並且這些人真正以有意義和重要的方式參與到美國的生活和文化中。莫里森已經認識到這種「長期觀點」歷史可以追溯到大約 160 年前的敘述可能性。這一觀點符合莫里森對祖先和祖先、記憶和傳統以及創立文化神話的興趣。在這些框架中，紅寶石的公民和修道院的居民——天堂的兩個不同且經常相互衝突的家庭、社區、政治和哲學參與概念的場所——參與了與非洲長期辯論密切相關的政治文化對話-美國社區。

Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) is a penetrating representation of African-American history that examines a number of topics which I will describe in the introduction to this work. Principally, I will in this paper scrutinize one of the most important of the subjects portrayed in Paradise—black history and political and cultural development within the parameters of American culture. As important as a reformed present is for the activist Morrison, we may extend her view of “current” African-American history all that way back to the slavery era, for it is in this era that African-American modern history truly begins, and these people actually become involved in American life and culture in significant and important ways. Morrison has recognized the narrative possibilities of this “long view” of history reaching back some 160 years. This view accords with Morrison’s interest in ancestry and the ancestor, memory and ritual, and founding cultural mythologies. In these frameworks the citizens of Ruby and the inhabitants of the Convent— Paradise’s two sites of differing and often conflicting conceptions of social and intellectual engagement—participate in a politico-cultural dialog that is germane to long-running debates in African-American communities.