The Road To Identity Reconstruction

Toni Morrison is an outstanding representative of black women writers.She is also the first African American female writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature.Her work Tar Baby is considered as a turning point in her writing career,from which Morrison began to focus on the process of the decolonization of African American culture and history.The novel Tar Baby,which follows the love story of the black protagonists,describes the cultural conflicts faced by different characters on the Isle des Chevaliers and prompts readers to think about the identity problems of the black minorities in Modern America nowadays.The identity crisis of the black minorities depicted in Tar Baby is in line with the identity crisis encountered by the minorities that Homi Bhabha explores.Based on Homi Bhabha's post-colonial theory and his concepts of “the minorities”,“identity”,“resistance” and the “Third Space”,this thesis analyzes the identity crisis of the black people living in America in Tar Baby.Bhabha believes that the marginal identity of the minorities,on the one hand,makes them suffer from cultural conflicts,and on the other hand,urges them to reflect on their relationship with other cultures.The black minorities in America should break the oppositional binarism and deal with cultural conflicts with an inclusive and consultative attitude,so as to reconstruct their identities in the “Third Space”.This thesis discusses firstly the identity crisis encountered by the different black minority groups and analyzes the causes of their identity crisis lying in the cultural attitudes of binary opposition.Secondly,the thesis illustrates different black groups' attempts to resist white hegemony in the public and private spaces under the influence of the attitudes of binary opposition.The thesis analyzes that binary opposition can not help the black minorities to solve the identity crisis completely.Seeking a new strategy to obtain identity turns out to be a must.Finally,this thesis discusses how the black minorities reconstruct their identities in the “Third Space” by means of communication.Through comparative analysis with the binary opposition strategy,this thesis clarifies the two essential stages for the black minorities to reconstruct their identities in three kindsof spaces and the significance of taking a communicating and negotiating strategy in their identity reconstruction.This thesis argues that Toni Morrison's Tar Baby transcends the narrow binary opposition and narrow nationalism,and advocates the consultative and coexisting relationship between different cultures.And it is of decisive significance in guiding the black minorities in America to pursue their identities and deal with cultural conflicts correctly.