Reconstruction Of Black Cultural Identity In A World Of Difference

As the first African-American woman writer winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Toni Morrison has published eight novels to date, each of them touched a level deeper than our usual understanding. With poetic language, ingenious use of myth and folklore, unconventional narrative structures, Morrison addresses such issues as black victimization, emotional and social effects of racial and sexual oppression, and the difficulties African Americans face in trying to achieve a sense of identity in a society dominated by white cultural values. Her magnificent body of work and keen insight into the cultural conditions in America have indeed aroused a great deal of critical interest in the literary world, articles and monographs galore on the writer and her works. Illuminated by the researches available at home and abroad, this dissertation takes Morrison's first six novels as its object of study and concentrates on zones of cultural interface in her works, where such cultural determinants as race, gender, class or ethnicity overlap and interact with one another.Identifying Morrison as a deconstructionist in the western world and combining this with a large cultural and historical context, the dissertation argues that Morrison's fiction originates in an area both inside and outside of Western literary criticism, which entails the employment of deconstructionist theory with deference to African-American cultural paradigms. Faced with a modern cultural crisis and the possibility of dissolution of black cultural characters, Morrison attempts to deconstruct white mythologies and discover a plurality of cultural references which may help to reconstruct African-American identity in a world of difference. This cultural identity works as the solid foundation for the open and continuous formation of personal identities for African Americans, urges the whites to reconsider their abilities to deal with differences in their society and reexamine their relationship with black people in history.The dissertation is composed of five chapters. Chapter One serves as an overview of Morrison's career and her work, more importantly it introduces the relevant theoretical background for this study. Chapter Two and Chapter Three focus on different aspects of Morrison's strategies to deconstruct a white cultural hegemony, while Chapter Four and Chapter Five put more emphasis on her ways to reconstruct African-American cultural identity in a world of difference. In Chapter One, two obvious reasons are given for the...