Earticle

초록

영어

This essay examines how Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye illustrates the mechanisms that reproduce the colonial relation between whites and blacks in modern America. While critics have discussed the theme of spiritual colonization of African American people in The Bluest Eye, they have paid less attention to the mechanisms that continue to interpellate African Americans as colonized subjects in America after slavery. In her first novel, telling the story of a black girl who has gone insane in her desperate pursuit of blue eyes, Morrison reports the destructive influence of white ideology on black people and critically examines the black community that is not able to provide its members with a cultural space where they can constitute a positive sense of self. However, Morrison equally closes up the social and psychological mechanisms that lure black characters, in Frantz Fanon’s words, to wish “turn white” and “avoid slipping back [to blackness].” Morrison introduces two distinctively different types of black people in her novel: first, black people whose only dream is to turn white because they blindly internalized white values through their daily consumption of cultural commodities; second, those who diligently imitate the middle class white people in order to distinguish themselves from low class “niggers.” And, Morrison represents both groups as people in grip of self-negation. Thus, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye suggests capitalist consumerism and mimicry as the mechanisms that keep colonizing black people in contemporary America. Reading capitalist consumerism as the institutional mechanism and mimicry as the psychological mechanism, this essay investigates how capitalist consumerism does not de-racialize but re-racialize modern America and how mimicry ceases to be a subversive strategy under certain circumstances.

목차

I. Introduction
 II. “Turn White” : Consumer Culture and Racialization
 III. “Avoid Slipping Back” : Mimicry and Colonization
 Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Kwangsoon Kim [ Kongju National University ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813