Identity Building Of African Americans In The Bluest Eye: Aninter Cultural Reading

As one of the most brilliant African American writers in the twentieth century as well as the first black female writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,Toni Morrison has won a widespread attention and acknowledgement over the globe for her epic themes,unique visions,profound cultural connotation,and richly detailed characters.Her first novel,The Bluest Eye which is published in 1970,depicts myriad types of black people and their consequential destinies due to the distinctive behaviors when facing the unparalleled power position between the dominant white and the marginalized black,fully manifesting Morrison's preoccupation on African American's frustration,confusion,and enquiry under the oppression of racial or sexual discrimination,cultural hegemony,as well as social inequity,whilst making her works particularly instructive and critical.Distinctive from Asian Americans,Mexican Americans,Irish Americans or other diasporic ethnicities,African Americans shows its singularity due to the forced migration,bondage slavery and bitter circumstance,which arouse the common interests of both literary and intercultural communication scholars domestic and overseas.In the light of both postcolonial concepts of hybridity and communicative paradigm of cultural contracts,this thesis goes into the African American protagonists' perceptions toward self and building of identity,attempting to draw IC scholars' attention on African American cultural identity demonstrated in postcolonialist discourse.Through detailed textual analysis,this thesis attempts to contrast sorts of African Americans' identity absence as being a racial-Other or sexual-Other,identity crisis of being caught between two homogenous cultures,and identity building via negotiating over cultural differences and correspondingly signing different cultural contracts.Furthermore,this study explores the deep-roots of their problematic and provocative identity predicaments,reiterating writer's emphasis on the essential influences of both inheriting black cultural and acknowledging cultural diversity shedding on the building of African American cultural identity,which not only reveals her endeavors to modify the nation's future via designing and rebuilding of African American identity via the literary discourse,but also reminds the readers of the urgency and significance of building an authentic,independent,as well asintegrated African American cultural identity when facing the prevailing cultural hegemony and infiltration.