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Flashbacks
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
If Beale Street Could Talk is, in many respects, a romance novel. Its central narrative is a love story, following Fonny and Tish as they grow closer through a series of flashbacks. These flashbacks occur while Tish is pregnant with Fonny's baby, while Fonny is unjustly imprisoned. In addition to a love story, though, the novel also focuses on a variety of close relationships, not just romantic ones. In this respect the novel takes the framework of a love story and applies it to a wider range of human connections. Family bonds between Tish and her parents play an important role, as do strained in-law connections between Frank, the Hunt family, and Tish's parents, as well as Fonny's long-lost friendship with Daniel. In short, Beale Street is a love story about all kinds of love.
In terms of its literary movement, Beale Street can be classified as postmodern due to its non-linear narrative and its prose style, which attempts to emulate Tish's thought and speech for long stretches at a time. In addition, Beale Street is a realist novel. American realism was a literary movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which aimed to depict societal problems and mores realistically, especially those of urban life. The most realist feature of this novel is the legal drama in which Hayward and Tish's family attempt to prove that Fonny did not rape Victoria Rogers. Such legal battles are a common trope of African American literature, where a main character struggles with a court system set up against them. The novel has also been associated with the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and 70s. Beale Street came at the tail end of the BAM, which was a sister literary movement to the political movement of Black Power, aiming to tell stories of Black pride, love, and hope.
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