Cultural Return And Identification: The Impact Of African Culture On Toni Morrison's Works

Cultural return and identification is a general response of rebelling modern society towards globalization. In the past 20 centuries, cultural root-seeking has developed into the most widely spread cultural renaissance movement, and therefore spawned a number of important cultural achievements. Africa, as one of the cradles of human civilization, once gave birth to splendid Egyptian civilization and rich cultural tradition. However, in today's world, Afro-American culture is being marginalized because of the dominant white culture. This trend has aroused serious thinking in Afro-American writers and has strongly encouraged them to maintain national history and traditional culture by literary creation. Morrison is one of these writers who have achieved a lot. She devotes herself to maintaining and promoting black culture in her literary creation, making her works rooted so deeply in the unique African traditional culture and real life of Afro-Americans. For Chinese readers, Toni Morrison (1931-) is no longer a strange name ever since she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Her works, especially the unique cultural features of Africa implied in her literary creation have attracted broad attention from critics at home and abroad. So far, Morrison has created nine novels, all of which are well-received by the public and have won many honors.As an African American, Morrison put sights on her national history and current status from the very beginning of her literary creation, and absorbed much from African traditional culture. It is obvious that African cultural tradition has produced great impact on her literary creation. In Morrison's novels, through depicting African mythology, folklore, music and so on, the author shows readers not only special charm of colorful African culture, but her deep concern and thinking on the future of Afro-Americans as well. She, on the one hand, tries to delve into the history of black people. On the other hand, she aims to not only explore and reconstruct black culture and national consciousness, but also carry forward the spirit of Black Nationalism, thus encouraging Afro-Americans to seek identity in national culture. Undoubtedly she understands that only by rooting in the African traditional culture, can black people find the true identity.Actually, it is not very new to study Toni Morrison from a cultural point. But it is also true that not too much attention is paid to the research from the angle of African tradition as a whole on her three major works, especially the research about concrete influences of African culture on her literary creation. Therefore, this paper tempts to challenge its difficulty and complexity. Through analyzing the text, this essay attempts to offer a new angle to appreciate Morrison's three novels Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved and enrich their textual meanings; to make readers have more thoughts and enlightenments of African cultures; to find out the concrete impact of African culture on Morrison's literary creation; to emphasize the importance and necessity for the contemporary African Americans to realize the importance of their traditional culture in order to help find their identity in a whitened world; to widen the view of the research on Morrison.This thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter 1 will first give a brief introduction about Toni Morrison and her literary achievements, followed by relevant researches on Morrison at home and abroad.Chapter 2 will first make a brief review of Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved, then introduce African traditional culture, mostly about myth and legend, music and naming, lastly followed by the specific embodiment of these cultural traditions in Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved .Chapter 3 is the most important part in this thesis. It aims to analyze the impact of African cultural tradition on Morrison's literary creation, which can be summarized into three aspects: firstly, African culture provides a wealth of materials to Morrison's literary creation; secondly, African culture promotes Morrison to form a unique musical narrative in her creation; finally, African culture inspires Morrison to establish her literary creative belief of pursuing cultural return and cultural identification.Chapter 4 is conclusion. According to analysis, it is easy to conclude that African cultural heritages have a strong impact on her literary creation and literary philosophy. Through her works, Morrison proposes that realizing cultural return and identification is the only way for African-Americans to escape from identity dilemma in order to establish their identity in the new world.