USE OF THE FOLK IN IDENTITY FORMATION
A necessary element of life, culture is the medium through which humans exercise their humanity and express and affirm their view of reality. For members of the African diaspora, culture surpassed its role to provide self-definition and sustain the group ethos; it became a way to physically survive. As a site of cosmic connection, identity, meaning and value were made and remade in order to resist. Through the tenacious practice of culture, Africans endured in America. --(K.Zaiditu-Selassie, African Spiritual tradition in the Novels of Toni Morrison,1)
In the history of human civilization the “forced transfer” of the Africans is the “defining event of the modern world” (Morrison, …show more content…
It is an inspiring creation of an African American woman writing about their identity and experiences of being a woman of color and necessarily the racial and gender issues are prioritised in the novel. The novel is originated from a conversation of Morrison with one of her black school friend who desired to have blue eyes—“she said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I “got mad” at her instead” (The Bluest Eye, Foreword).Morrison’s novel is an attempt to project the psychological devastation of Pecola Breedlove, an adolescent black girl and her futile effort to search love and acceptance in a white controlled world that despises and denies black cultural identity. In her first novel, Morrison is attempting to explicate the tragic effects of the imposition of white, middle-class American idea of beauty on the process of identity formation of a young black American girl during the early 1940s. The novel was published during the peak of Black Arts Movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s and received considerable attention from the critical circle. The Bluest Eye is assessed as the milestone in African American literature with its sensitive portrayal of African American female identity and at the same time providing a critique of the internalization of racism born out of the imposed American cultural definition of
A necessary element of life, culture is the medium through which humans exercise their humanity and express and affirm their view of reality. For members of the African diaspora, culture surpassed its role to provide self-definition and sustain the group ethos; it became a way to physically survive. As a site of cosmic connection, identity, meaning and value were made and remade in order to resist. Through the tenacious practice of culture, Africans endured in America. --(K.Zaiditu-Selassie, African Spiritual tradition in the Novels of Toni Morrison,1)
In the history of human civilization the “forced transfer” of the Africans is the “defining event of the modern world” (Morrison, …show more content…
It is an inspiring creation of an African American woman writing about their identity and experiences of being a woman of color and necessarily the racial and gender issues are prioritised in the novel. The novel is originated from a conversation of Morrison with one of her black school friend who desired to have blue eyes—“she said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I “got mad” at her instead” (The Bluest Eye, Foreword).Morrison’s novel is an attempt to project the psychological devastation of Pecola Breedlove, an adolescent black girl and her futile effort to search love and acceptance in a white controlled world that despises and denies black cultural identity. In her first novel, Morrison is attempting to explicate the tragic effects of the imposition of white, middle-class American idea of beauty on the process of identity formation of a young black American girl during the early 1940s. The novel was published during the peak of Black Arts Movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s and received considerable attention from the critical circle. The Bluest Eye is assessed as the milestone in African American literature with its sensitive portrayal of African American female identity and at the same time providing a critique of the internalization of racism born out of the imposed American cultural definition of