The World Of The Other In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

This thesis is intended to analyze The Bluest Eye, the first novel by Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel laureate in the United States. This novel was published in the early 1970s, and it tells about a story of a little black girl who desires for a pair of blue eyes. Readers will find this novel extremely powerful, as it has revealed the inter-colonialism of the United States which has an immense impact on the psycho of the black minorities. I will start my analysis from the postcolonial perspective to explain the culturally and psychologically colonized Afro-Americans, and try to dig out the inner elements that result their self-loathing, self-contempt and the dilemma of A fro-Americans' national and cultural identity. As Toni Morrison has deliberately destroyed the white-imitating black world in this novel, a deconstructive interpretation would be quite proper in analyzing the split and fragmentary images in the novel. Further more, Toni Morrison tried to reconstruct a black history by highlighting Afro-American tradition and heritage, such as blues, jazz, quilt-making, ghost story, African legends and religions, etc. In the concluding part, I will try to stand in a position above the author and put her in the context of postcolonial cultural studies, then, by discussing her achievements in the mainstream culture as the Other, I will try to find some similarities between the black writing and Chinese writing, which is also marginalized by the West hegemony.