The Political Concern: Race And Gender In Song Of Solomon

Song of Solomon is one of Toni Morrison's masterpieces, for which she was given the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1978. Having found its way into the classics canon of American literature, the novel, since the day it was brought to the public, has been gathering a considerable number of reviewers around it, who appreciatively center on either its unique craftsmanship or its provoking thoughts. It is Morrison's only novel that takes a black male, instead of a black woman, as the protagonist, which has never occurred in the rest of her works up to now. Devoted to her fellow people, Morrison undertakes the duty to speak for her black people and her black women respectively without leaving Song of Morrison out as an exception.Literary critics have held the idea for a long time that literature may be read as political theory. In the history of literature, its role of the ideal carrier for the expression and the spreading of political theories has long been recognized. Literary fictions act as teachers of politics to offer a different vision of the political reflections on worlds that are and creative imaginings of those that could be. Morrison claims that a novel should be aesthetically beautiful and politically powerful. Morrison admits that "It seems to me the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time." And she also argues that a novel "must have something in it that suggest what the conflicts are, what the problems are".In Song of Solomon, the mastery of story-telling enables Morrison to transfer her political concerns to the readers tactfully. The thesis is dedicated to the exploration of the motifs and political implications hidden in the narrative that Morrison, as an Afro-American woman writer, concerns most—the ethnicity and gender problem. The thesis concentrates mainly on racial politics by using the call-and-response pattern and the naming strategy to reveal Morrison's political thoughts on racial oppression and resistance. With a close studying of the African American females collectively and individually, the thesis attempts to uncover Morrison's political stand on the reconstruction of the identity of black women in the seemingly women-marginalized text.As Morrison declares, "The work must be political," she follows the belief throughout her literary compositions. Relating the story of a black boy's quest for the cultural rootedness, Morrison voices the significance of blacks' long-existing civilization and tradition. She prescribes for the problems of the racial identity and ethnic violence and reinforces black women's irreplaceable role in preserving and passing down cultural heritage, which is the point the thesis strives to present.