The Search For Ideal Home

Toni Morrison, the spokesperson of Afro-American literature, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. Morrison's literary creations constitute a long search for the representative of African American voice. Tar Baby, Morrison's fourth novel, explores the black or African American identity. A young black woman, Jadine, having accepted white values and cultural standards, has adjusted to the white standard definition of beauty. The arrival of the black drifter Son upsets Jadine's life; he even accuses her of rejecting her blackness. In the novel Tar Baby, Morrison explores the predicament of homelessness in connection with African American love relationships. It is crucial for Morrison that home is not a simple form of refuge; it is related to self-identity.This thesis intends to situate Toni Morrison's Tar Baby in a postcolonial context to explore the dilemma of the African Americans in trying to search for their "ideal home"—their own cultural identity. It also probes into the causes of their plights, which include colonialism, racial oppression and cultural hegemony imposed by the mainstream society.A postcolonial approach is essential in revealing the colonial themes that are dominant in Morrison's novels. The postcolonial criticism this thesis employs is mainly concerned with cultural exploitation and hegemony that define the relationship between the colonizing subject and the colonized one. Moreover, these postcolonial ideas this thesis touches upon are mainly from those notable theorists as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. By comparing the two different cultural choices made by the protagonists in Tar Baby, this thesis indicates that African Americans should face up to their indigenous culture and absorb the essence of dominant culture. Only in this way can they reconstruct their own "ideal home" and live a balanced life.