The Discourse of Racist Violence in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Subject Areas : Literary Studies
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Keywords: Racist violence, Racial ideology, Internalized racism, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye,
Abstract :
The present paper explores how Western's overpowering cultural ideals of beauty, founded on physical features function as tools of racial oppression. Alienation, self-rejection, self-loathing and ultimately self-destruction are Afro-Americans' reactions to the dominant standards of Western culture. Black laborers manifested a host of negatives linked with traditions and ideologies that portrayed blackness as evil, the devil, God's curse, nighttime fears and beauty's opposite. Thus the separation of blacks from other races of mankind was unquestionable. The objective of this paper is to explore psychological and ideological means that justify and internalize racism in the mindsets of both Euro-Americans and diasporic Afro-Americans. An amalgamation of Black gender feminism, psychoanalytic approaches, and linguistic racism in addition to critical discourse analysis was used to provide the innovative methodology practiced in this paper. A linguistic reading of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye offers a fresh sight at the gate of new literary interpretation methods; moreover, applying CDA as an interdisciplinary approach that looks at language as a form of social performance to trace racism in the slavery system is the innovative aspect of the present paper. This paper concludes that internalized racism is not only a psychological but an ideological problem. It is also concluded that although racism has an ideological basis, it cannot be reduced to ideology, as is often done in literary texts.
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