Bøger af Mohamed Sghir Syad

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Literature, University of Nottingham (School of Canadian and American Studies), course: American studies, language: English, abstract: Racism and sexism are endemic to the stereotypical ¿othering¿ enterprise that brackets black female subjectivity in a forced homogeneity. Doubly stereotyped as the racial and sexual ¿other¿, black women risk being forced to signify the negative counterpart in a binary system of cultural and political representation. Usually white and male, the defining subject associates negatively inflected traits with the defined ¿other¿ ¿ in this context a black female ¿ while reserving positive attributes for its own definition and identification. In recasting black women¿s subjectivity in fiction, Morrison admits the existence of racial and sexual stereotypes. From her first published novel, "The Bluest Eye", Morrison challenges and deconstructs the double plight of black women in the U.S. by exposing, first, the processes involved in racial and gendered ¿othering¿ and, second, the consequent internalised effects that transmute into ¿self-othering.¿

This book explores Toni Morrison¿s strategic negotiation of the essentialism/anti-essentialism dialectic regarding the representation of African American female subjectivity, the rewriting of African American history, and the re-appropriation of African American musical aesthetics in fiction. It also examines how Morrison¿s dual-stance positioning demonstrates the conscious strategy of achieving the double goal of recovering African American and female voices as well as of critiquing hegemonic cultural logics about race and gender. The book argues that the motivations behind Morrison¿s dialectic accommodation of the two stances in her fiction, namely The Bluest Eye, Sula, ¿Recitatif¿, Jazz, and Paradise, are related to her strategic positioning that offers fruitful possibilities for mediating affirmations of difference and the necessity of racial, gender and cultural group politics.