Twenty-five years have elapsed since the publication of Beloved. In all its complexity, Toni Morrison’s novel forms a peak, both concluding the previous decades of neo-slave narratives and introducing the following ones. As the following article argues, reviewing the many ways the novel has closed a period and opened a new one will help us gain a new perspective and understand new articulations and developments in slavery literature. Misrahi-Barak contends that the genre of the neo-slave narrative has ceased to be African-American only, but has become transnational and global, dialogic, polyphonic and trans-generic. It has also been instrumental in implementing a rapprochement between disciplines that used to be watertight.