ABSTRACT
Animated by the ideals of the civil rights movement, Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian imagines “beloved communities” predicated on the collapse of psychological and physical borders between self and (racial or ethnic) others and on the possibilities of intersubjective communication. Invigorating a vision much like Eldridge Cleaver’s, the committed student activists in the novel participate in interracial political action, build interracial social communities and nurture interracial friendships. But the interracial ideal is most powerfully figured by the novel’s representation of interracial desire and a biracial child born of that relationship. Two student activists, Truman and Lynne, come together, invigorated by the utopian, integrationist vision of the early student movement. Their child, Camara, could be seen as the embodiment of this radically new vision in which the social prohibitions of race and gender are shattered by the force of love.
