Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, is set in the aftermath of slavery in the American South and engages intimately with the bodily realities of slave life, including the insects, parasites, and physical degradations that enslaved people endured. Morrison depicts the horrors of the Middle Passage and the slave quarters in ways that include the insects and vermin that were inescapable aspects of the dehumanising conditions of slavery, connecting bodily parasitic suffering to the broader structure of racial exploitation.

Morrison's engagement with the bodily realities of slavery — including its insect and parasitic dimensions — placed the tradition of writing about human parasites in direct conversation with the history of racial slavery and its physical consequences. Her work, and that of other African American writers in the late twentieth century, demonstrated that the tradition of writing about parasites and vermin could not be fully understood without attending to the racial and economic structures that made certain bodies more vulnerable to parasitic infestation than others. Beloved won the Nobel Prize for Literature for Morrison in 1993.