commercially inclined commentators. Reviewers almost unanimously proclaimed it a masterpiece. In just six years the number of critical essays published on this novel rivals those written on only a few other contemporary African American novels: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), a favorite of American English departments, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), a favorite of women's studies departments. Like these two novels, Beloved has passed into the mainstream curriculum of our universities, at least for the time being. That passing could be seen as a measure of an increasing awareness of "multiculturalism" and "feminism" in the academy, an awareness for which many people of color and women writers and scholars have struggled. Yet I am perturbed by the attention, by the kind of critical attention Beloved has tended to receive, or to put it in our current literary critical language, by the critical discourses that I fear are beginning to appropriate this complex novel. I am not worried that Beloved will be destroyed by these discourses, for given the