Toni Cade Bambara

Their Ugliness Was Unique”: An African American Literary Examination of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Does being ugly refer to the physical aspects of a person, the way they think, the color of their skin, or the way in which one is raised? Toni Morrison, an African American novelist, originally named Chloe Anthony Wofford, interprets and examines the “black experience” throughout her many novels (http://www.britannica.com/Toni-Morrison). The Bluest Eye, being one of them, is a remarkable…

In Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” Twyla Benson retells the story of her time in St. Bonaventure shelter and encounters with Roberta Frisk, but they remember different things each time they reminisce on the past. Twyla finds herself evaluating what really happened in her life, shifting ideas based on her own memories and what Roberta thinks. Her thoughts are ultimately distorted, raising questions on what is actually true. Twyla, as the narrator, tells the story with her own bias, making it…

On April 23, Beyonce and Warsan Shire debuted an empowering visual album titled Lemonade in an HBO special dedicated to Black women. It depicted the journey of self-knowledge and healing through stages over a period of time; in the following order intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, loss, accountability, reformation, forgiveness,resurrection, hope, and redemption. Within each segment lies a woman dealing with her internal demons, societal pressure set against her, her relationship to…

This essay will be discussing how the motif of sacrifice is used by Toni Morrison throughout her novel Sula (1974), namely the sacrifice of motherhood. Sacrifice is found in different forms in Sula; physically through self-mutilation, murder or suicide and also the emotional sacrifice of love. This sacrifice of love is shown primarily through the mothers in the story, through what they have had to give up to keep their children alive. The motif of sacrifice in Sula is most strongly…

Discrimination, perhaps one of the biggest faults found in humanity, has affected the world for the entirety of mankind. It has been the root of wars, attacks, massacres, and movements that have sown the seeds of this world’s history and helped society grow into what it is today. It has caused a number of people to be victimized for their race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. In this nation alone, slavery and oppression of African Americans were the results of racial discrimination for…

Throughout history, American beauty standards have continued to give an unfair advantage to those with light skin. These ideals consequently leave a lasting and painful impression on those that do not fit this criteria. Toni Morrison, an African American female novelist who experienced these hindrances firsthand, brings to light the struggle African Americans face daily to overcome these systematic barriers in her works. Through symbolism and contrasting perspectives that follow…

Alice Walker, in full Alice Malsenior Walker was born on 9th February 1944 in Eatonton Georgia U.S. and is now one of the country’s best-selling writers of literary fiction. Alice walker’s life was life of any African American in 1940s. She was deprived of all the basic amenities and discrimination was rampant all around, which Alice later started expressing through her short stories, novel, poems etc. More than ten million copies of her books are in print." Walker has now become a focal…

The Bluest Eye Literary Analysis For some being a child is not as simple as just growing up, and for young black people in the 1940’s this cannot be any closer to the truth. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel following the life of Pecola, a young black girl growing up during The Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. In this coming of age story, Pecola experiences the harmful effects of beauty standards, racism, trauma, and rape. Pecola, along with other characters in the novel such as…

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison addresses the recurring themes and faults of racial portrayal in American literature. A substantial amount of this analysis has to do with the concept of the racial imaginary and racial canon. Using specific examples from ‘classic’ American authors, the author breaks apart the underpinnings of allegories around race. Morrison asserts that a contributing part of racism is poor portrayals of people of color in literature. This literary criticism crafts complex…

Introduction In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, author Zora Neale Hurston incorporates the figurative presence of a horizon in her framing of the plot’s beginning in end, as well as the personal development that protagonist Janie Mae Crawford experiences in the form of a journey of self-realization. The concept of a horizon is critical to the work in two aspects. First, it serves as a metaphor to exemplify the distance separating Janie from the genuine happiness she seeks, which Hurston…