A Study Of Toni Morrison’s Identity-Building In Spatital Politics Of Race, Gender And Power

It has been widely acknowledged that the first African American female Nobel Laureate for Literature Toni Morrison is one of the most remarkable and influential writers in the world. Her works always interweave with many distinguished aspects, such as race, gender, power, class, and survival. Morrison’s works are rather political, immersing the issues of black women’s self-consciousness and identity-building under the oppression in various spaces. Politics and space are mingled and inseparable. Though many scholars and critics have done much efforts on the research of her works in recent decades, such as the aspect of psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, feminism, or the narrative techniques, maternal love, there is still much room in different perspectives. Identity-building and spacial politics are two of them.This thesis quests to explore Morrison and characters’female identity-building in the theory of spatial politics in terms of race, gender and power under the framework of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, especially the spatial triad-the spatial practice, the representation of space and the representational space. The intersection point is a new foothold in Morrison’s study, making the analysis more detailed and thorough. It is a revealing fact that African Americans and other marginal groups should learn to transform from the depreciation of their identity to the affirmation of it, then to build it with unequivocal confidence.On the other hand, for the writing technique, Morrison herself and two of her works:Beloved and The Bluest Eye are taken as the parallel objects in the thesis, corresponding to the three moments of "spatial triad", which makes the analysis in the thesis more coherent and become a stereoscopic net rather than independent elements.