The location of black identity in Toni Morrison's fiction

Kwang Soon Kim, Purdue University

Abstract

This project traces Morrison’s critique of the emancipatory visions that penetrate the era of the Black Power Movement and investigates the postcolonial vision of black identity that Morrison attempts to shape in her first five novels: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved. During the last five decades, critics have noted the theme of spiritual decolonization of black people in Morrison’s fiction. However, they have primarily focused on how black people have been spiritually and physically victimized throughout the oppressive black history in the United States. And, those critics have more or less characterized Morrison as a nativist writer who sees the recovery of authentic blackness as the primary condition of black liberation. This dissertation avoids such nativist reading of Morrison’s fiction and pays close attention to Morrison’s political representation of colonial relations between blacks and whites. To read the complexity of colonial relations between blacks and whites in Morrison’s fiction, my dissertation refers to the work of postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha and particularly integrates the concepts of mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity. Reading Morrison’s fiction in the frame of postcolonial theory, this dissertation maps Morrison’s literary journey and discusses how/where Morrison locates the liberated/postcolonial black identity. Embarking on her literary journey for black liberation with the case of Pecola that records the bleak repercussion of spiritual colonization of black people in The Bluest Eye, in the following novels, Morrison critiques the decolonizing visions by visiting a variety of cultural spaces from Milkman’s black middle-class home in Song of Solomon to the culture-bearing agrarian black communities such as Shalimar, Virginia, in Song of Solomon and Eloe, Florida, in Tar Baby to cosmopolitan white urban cities in Tar Baby. Morrison’s literary journey for postcolonial black identity culminates in her rewriting of the official history that has been represented by Western colonial discourses in Beloved. Rewriting the historical case of a black slave mother’s infanticide in Beloved, Morrison discloses that black people have achieved freedom and self-authority through their parodic appropriation of colonial discourses even during slavery, which was the most oppressive period in the black history. Ultimately, Morrison configures postcolonial black identity as local, political and “contingent closure but no teleology and holism” (Bhabha185). Thus, instead of designating a totalizing cultural ground for black people, Morrison locates postcolonial black identity in the socio-political ground where cultures are hybridized, powers are negotiated, and individuals are reproduced as resistant agents.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

African American Studies|Modern literature|Black studies|American literature

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