Somaesthetics In Toni Morrison's Works

Toni Morrison is an outstanding contemporary African-American writer.Based on the life of African-Americans she expressed her calm and profound reflection on the survival of black people in her creations.Through shaping body images,Morrison sketched a self-rescue road which guided the blacks out of their inferiority and led them to rebuild the beauty of the blacks and the black community.On the ground of Somaesthetics,this thesis studies the transformation process of black people from cultural inferiority to cultural self-confidence in Toni Morrison's novels.Firstly,the paper analyzes the “ugliness” of black people that is presented in Toni Morrison?s works.In Toni Morrison?s opinion,black people changed their aesthetics for they were influenced by the dominant culture.They started to consider black is ugly while white is beautiful.This change in aesthetics caused black people to fall into extreme inferiority and caused a devastating blow to the black race.To free the blacks from racial inferiority,Toni Morrison studied their psychology in depth and chalked the inferiority of black people up to cultural colonization.Secondly,the paper writes about black people's exploration of their own beauty.The loss of culture had caused the spiritual degeneration of the black,which was characterized by money worship and lack of sense of responsibility.Accordingly,the black people were surrounded by loneliness and powerlessness in life.In such circumstances,Morrison guided the black people to embark on the road of root-seeking to explore the beauty of black people and draw spiritual strength from the history of ancestors.For black women,the beauty of blacks had another meaning for they not only shoulder the historical mission of resisting racial discrimination,but also of getting rid of patriarchal oppression.In Morrison?s perspectives,the spiritual beauty of black female is the realization the realization of female value.Thirdly,the paper writes about the reconstruction of the beauty of black people.In the work,the author reconstructed the spiritual beauty of the black people,including the persistence of the dignity of life,the emphasis on emotional communication,and the cherishing of female friendship.These are the spiritual wealth of the black that was accumulated in history.The reconstruction of the spiritual world is the restoration of harmonious lifeFourthly,the paper talks about that love forms the beauty of black community.In Toni Morrison?s view,the community full of love was a physical sanatorium and a spiritual habitat for black people.The beauty of the black community was based on self-respect and self-confidence of the black individual.Only the black people can completely get rid of the self-inferiority and gain the freedom of mind and body,can the community become a powerful force to protect black people?s rights and to promote the development of African-American culture.Toni Morrison combined the care of race and women with the shaping of body images together tightly in her creations.Therefore,this dissertation focuses on body images and uses Somaesthetics theory to analyze her thinking about the fate of black people.