The Destructiveness Of White Cultural Hegemony

The Bluest Eye is the first novel of Toni Morrison, one of the most well-known African-American writers in the United States of America, and The Bluest Eye portrays the tragedy of American black. In the novel the tragic and miserable experience of the black reveals the crimes of the white cultural hegemony.The marginalization of the black culture and the internalization of the white culture by the black seriously poison the American society which is permeated with racial discrimination, values and judgment by white standard. Such a society leads to the black's self-hatred, self-denial and self-loss which result in the tragedy of the black people. This thesis, by analyzing from the post-colonial perspective, reveals the destructive harm of the white dominant culture to the black and the root causes of the black's tragedy.This thesis is made up of three chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion.The Introduction part focuses on the literature review of The Bluest Eye, the post-colonialism employed in the thesis and the questions discussed in this thesis.Chapter One explores the white cultural hegemony in American society, the forms of the white cultural hegemony as well as the impact it has on the black and the black culture; White culture has the controlling power and swallows other already weaker cultures ruthlessly in an attempt to achieve cultural assimilation; White cultural hegemony dominates the American black and other minorities politically, culturally and psychologically.Chapter Two centers on the destructive harm of the white cultural hegemony to the black individuals, and to the black community and black school as well. The black'internalization of the white culture and the negation of their own black culture contribute to the development of the depressive personalities in the black and lead to the indifference of the community and sometimes even cruelty and hostility of the black community to its fellow black.Chapter Three primarily concentrates on the tragedy of the black under the white cultural hegemony and analyzes the root causes for these tragedies. By exploring the destructive harm of white. cultural hegemony, the conclusion of the thesis is that the root causes for the tragedy of the black are cultural hegemony.