Songs of silence: Toni Morrison and 'third-world women'

W. E. B. Du Bois once declared, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." With the incessant irruptions of racial politics, however, a heterogeneous myriad of problems have emerged along other imaginary, invincible lines that force Du Bois' chromatic vision beyond its pale. The Million Men March in 1995, for one, evidences a historical redundancy of black racial politics precisely by repeating its homophilic base of social movement that showcases black women as redundant. Veiled as a silent extra behind the facade of black racial politics, African-American women become a genuine "sub-altern"--become indeed both the lower of the low and the other implicated within the other. Their struggles for voices and actions involve a synthesized and syndicated engagement with their double jeopardy of racial and sexual traumas. From behind the skene of blacks' grand narratives of freedom, African-American women seek their points of emergence from multiple choices of angles. From the discourses of opposition and hybridity to Alice Walker's postulation of "Womanism," from the assumption of identity as an inherited marking to the postulation of strategic subjectivity, "third-world feminisms" and politics of identity prove as diverse as they are multitudinous. Against such a motley background of cultural criticisms, this dissertation attempts to locate the trajectory of Morrison's literary achievements. The reading of Beloved examines how Morrison renders the politics of identity in her fiction into political strategies of cultural enunciation. The chapter on Song of Solomon and Tar Baby brings blacks' identity problems to face up to Morrison's conception of an ideal black community. And a comparative study of The Bluest Eve, Sula, and Jazz addresses in particular the variety of black womanhood that Morrison constructs against the tapestry of black history. It further calls into question the inherent contradictions in the gender relationships and the black community she imagines. Exploring how Morrison's female characters struggle against their manifold and simultaneous oppressions, this dissertation aspires after a plausible politics of survival that allows dynamic alignments of both the construction of one's self-identity and the needed expediency of strategic coalitions.