A Comparative Study Of Disappearance And The Bluest Eye From A Postcolonial Perspective

The thesis conducts a comparative study of the well-known Guyanese writer David Dabydeen's Disappearance and the famous female African-American novelist Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye from a postcolonial perspective.Both of Disappearance and The Bluest Eye narrate the spiritual dilemma of the colonized black people who live in the white-dominant society.Although the colonial rule may be over,the spiritual colonialism isn't ended accordingly.The colonizer has implemented cultural hegemony to assimilate the colonized through manipulating the mass media,school education and religious beliefs,which causes black people become experience an inferiority complex and self-hated.They forget their black culture in order to integrate into the white society but consequently suffer an identity crisis.The thesis uses methods of comparative study to analyze the similarities and differences between the two novels on the basis of Antonio Gramsci's cultural hegemony theory and Frantz Fanon's racial trauma theory.The thesis explores the postcolonial motif,analyzes the blacks' tortured mentality and identity crisis and discusses the harm inflicted by cultural hegemony on black people from three aspects,namely:mass media,education and religion.Different aspects of racial trauma are depicted in the two fictions.The Bluest Eye shows the racial trauma of the colonized while Disappearance displays the racial trauma both of the colonized black people and of the white colonizer.Besides,the attitude towards the black tradition is also different in them.In The Bluest Eye,the idea that black people should inherit the black tradition to survive in the white-dominant society is pointed out while in Disappearance,the author mentions that tenacious adherence of the black tradition but neglect of the modern civilization will still lead to the tragic consequence.Therefore,black people ought to learn how to regard black culture and tradition appropriately in order to escape their spiritual dilemma and find the right way to avoid an identity crisis.In addition,the author of the thesis hopes to encourage readers to conduct more research into Guyanese literature and black literature through doing the comparative study of the two novels.