Tar Baby

by Toni Morrison

Tar Baby: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

Tar Baby is a novel of literary fiction. Morrison crafts a fictional narrative set against the backdrop of a fictional island, the Isle de Chevaliers. However, Morrison takes heavy inspiration from real-life settings like Dominica, an island in the Caribbean that served as a hub for the French and British slave trades in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Tar Baby, readers learn that the Isle de Chevaliers, like many islands in the Caribbean, has a dark history of enslavement and colonialism.