This article approaches the study of Toni Morrison's latest novel, Paradise (1998), as an illustration of the process of (African) American identity-formation. The two communities that Morrison contraposes in the novel may be seen as representative of two different trends in America's construction of national identity: assimilation and homogenization, on the one hand, or interactive difference, on the other. Whereas Ruby emerges as a proud and paradisiacal African American town which gradually falls prey to its Manichean view of the world, the Convent is eventually presented as an alternative open community. Thus, Ruby functions as a mirror to American history. By adopting the American creeds and religious typology present in the Puritan origins of the United States, the community of Ruby reproduces the exclusionist, discriminatory, isolationist, hegemonic and violent character of American society as well as the tensions within it. The Convent, on the other hand, evolves towards the creation of a spiritual paradise based on the fluid hybridization of opposites. The issues of race and gender appear to be central to the construction of both communities, although it is religion, and particularly the adoption of the American jeremiad and the myth of the City upon a Hill, what provides the structural and thematic pattern for the novel. **********
