The Politics Of Space And Identification:the "South" In Toni Morrison’s Fictions

Toni Morrison as the first African American female writer awarded nobel prize in literature has published to the present nine novels concentrating on different aspects of life that black people have lived in their struggle for equal rights in the US, many critics have approached her works from various perspectives, based on the politics of space and postcolonial theories, the current thesis is attempting to study how Toni Morrison has artistically constructed in her novels the American south as an arena where the white people’s superiority and domination have been questioned and even subverted in asserting black people’s Americanness identity.The thesis is divided into four chapters, Chapter one presents a brief introduction of Toni Morrison including her works, background and accomplishments, this part will also indicate the purpose the paper is expected to realize, chapter two offers an academic map that literary critics from around the world have pictured concerning the research on Toni Morrison, showcasing how critics have interpreted Morrison and her works in the light of different literary criticisms. This part also details the politics of space and postcolonial theories of which the arguments are mobilized to analyze Morrison’s novels in the body of the paper. Chapter three is dedicated to explore how the author has established the south in America as the sweet home for black people, before answering the question this session has investigated the three kinds of strategies:body; discourse; and the mythology that Morrison has deployed in her novels to question and resist the superiority of the white culture in the south, and the last chapter wraps up the paper concluding that Morrison has succeeded in building in her series of works a more imaginary than geographic ’South’, as both an arena where she initiated a great deal of attacks by interrogating and challenging the dominant white cultural believes and doctrines, and a home where black people recuperated identity and could articulate their ideas and feelings.