“This is the Kind of Hard That Knows”: Past, Presence, and Pedagogy in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

This article is derived from my practice as a teacher educator working with social studies teachers. In it, I write in tentative steps to think pedagogically about the ways that encountering a particular text, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, can illustrate the ways in which knowledge is reformed or recognized in the pedagogical scene. Drawing from psychoanalytic inquiries within education research, I turn to how the Lacanian notion of “full speech” might bring a kind of focus to new, forward reaching ways of knowing in relation to the past for those involved in the work of pedagogy.