A Study On The Spatial Politics And Identity-Building In Home By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, one of the most famous writers in America, is the first black female writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. She has created ten novels and always asserts that all good art has always been political and she is the first writer who reflects the problems among the black themselves, and also brings black female literature into the mainstream literature of America.Morrison’s novels have inspired a large quantity of studies, reviews, essays and monographs on various subjects with different critical methodologies both in China and abroad. But compared with her early works, such as The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved, there are fewer researches and studies on her latest three novels: Love, A Mercy and Home in China, especially Home, which came out in June 2012. The Chinese version of it has just been published in November 2014. More researches need to be done. Most studies on her novels focus on the feminism, womanism, new-historism, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, narratology, and psychologism. Spatial theory as a new research method and perspective has not been fully studied and developed. Thus taking Henri Lefebvre’s “spatial triad” as the basic theoretic framework, this thesis aims to analyze the universal existence of spatial politics in Home from the perspective of spatial theory, which includes racial politics, gender politics and spatial revolt. This study also tries to explore the production and reproduction mechanism of the space constructed by Morrison’s narrative strategy and demonstrate the conflicts, the changes and the transformations among the “representations of space”(conceived space), the “spaces of representation”(lived space) and the “spatial practices”(perceived space) to reveal Morrison’s poetics of spatial politics.Introduction summarizes the background and main opinions of Toni Morrison, the significances of the research, and the studies both in China and abroad. Chapter One introduces the main theories, including the spatial theory, the development of the spatial politics, the spatial triad of Lefebvre, and the relation between the identity-building and the culture. Chapter Two discusses the spatial politics of race from the experiences of Frank, and points out that African-American blacks should draw strength from their black culture to free themselves. Chapter Three studies the spatial politics of gender through Cee’s experiences to probe into how the black female establish their identities under the double oppressions in the American society. Chapter Four explores the spatial revolt, cultural revolt, and the importance of rememory to the black. Conclusion indicates that the way out for the African-American blacks is to revisit history, go back to the community, inherit, maintain and love their own black culture. Only in this way, can they identify themselves in the third space, and obtain the independence in the multi-cultural America.