The Cultural Identity Of Black Women In Tar Baby

As the only American black female writer rewarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Tony Morrison is the frontier of the contemporary African American literature. Her works displays life and cultural dilemma of African Americans, focusing on the conflict between white culture and black culture.This thesis analyses her fourth novel Tar Baby. This thesis compares Jadine's and Therese's absolutely different attitudes towards traditional black culture and dominant white culture and points out that the search for the African American women's cultural identity is a necessity and must in the present multicultural world. Only after settling the puzzlement of cultural identity, the "ancient properties" of black culture is probably passed on to the next generation and simultaneously the excellence of white culture can be assimilated so that black women can understand their true selves and free themselves from the perplexity of cultural identity. But at present, the study on this novel is mainly centered from the points of feminism, narrative techniques, connotation of names, images, folklores and African American culture criticism etc. From the perspective of cultural identity, this thesis attempts to explore the dilemma of, attitude to and solution to cultural identity for black female being tortured in the conflict between black culture and white culture.Theoretically this thesis illustrates the cultural identity of the long ignored black female group with an emphasis on the marginalized group they stand for and the method to reconstruct their black female cultural identity in order to survive in the multicultural world. The feasible approach to seek out the cultural identity for black female is inheriting the root of black culture and meanwhile absorbing the elite of white culture, trying to build a real bridge between black culture and white culture.This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter one introduces Toni Morrison and Tar Baby in brief and presents the critical overview of Tar Baby. Chapter two analyzes the concept of cultural identity and its reflection in this novel. The third chapter explores the question of cultural identity of Jadine and Therese in detail. The fourth chapter focuses on Morrison's search for the cultural identity of black women. The thesis concludes that only inheritance of the black culture and meanwhile acceptance of the excellence of the white culture are the right choices.