Search For Self Under The Clash Of Different Cultures

Toni Morrison is the first black woman writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Since the publishing of her maiden work The Bluest Eye in 1970, she has published seven other novels of high quality and profound meaning. Her works concern political issues, such as race, gender, class, etc., with the purpose of reconstructing black history and black culture. Morrison's fiction has profound cultural connotations and metaphorical meanings, with a massive sense of history and modernity.The conflict between black culture and white culture is one of the most influential and distinguished characteristics of Morrison's fiction. This thesis offers a systematic study of the conflict between black culture and white culture, and of the contradiction between tradition and modernity. By interpreting Tar Baby, the embarrassment and perplexity modern African Americans face in searching for self and self-fulfillment is anatomized. No matter how hard they try to transcend themselves, they cannot erase or ignore their blackness, which is the root of their lives.This thesis is divided into four chapters besides introduction and conclusion. Based on the textual analysis of Tar Baby, it employs the theories of culture criticism, namely post-colonialism and feminism, to interpret and expatiate the conflicts between black culture and white culture, the cultural hegemony of the whites as well as the identity perplexity of African Americans, so the multi-puzzledom and its reasons that African Americans confront in the process of searching for their...