scholarly journals “He Mought, en Den Again He Moughtent”: The Ambiguous Man in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Tuula Kolehmainen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
African American Male ◽  
First Impressions ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
European Education

In this article, I discuss Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel, Tar Baby, through the lens of a trickster tale on which the novel is loosely based. Tar Baby invites one to choose sides between Jadine, the African American female protagonist with a European education and worldviews, or Son, the bearer of a more traditional African American cultural heritage and values. Son is initially constructed as other, and his representation is based on negative stereotypical notions of the African American male. First impressions need to be revised later, as the text plays with the readers’ sympathies about Son. Even his survival is left open at the end of the novel and the range of options of how to categorize Son would seem to reflect the readers’ perceptions back on themselves. In this way, Morrison sets up a trap in which any reader making too easy or essentialist definitions of the character will fall. Thus, the most important expression of the trickster tale is the novel’s name: the novel itself is the tar baby. Moreover, the most important construction of tar lies in the ambiguous representation of Son.

scholarly journals The Expression of Love in Long Distance Life (1989) by Marita Golden

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Diome FAYE
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black American ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Family ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Family Living ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
So Long A Letter

In Long Distance Life (1989), Marita Golden, one of the most outstanding African American female writers, follows up her first novel,A Woman’s Place (1986) with an impressionistic sort of saga about a black American family living in Washington, D.C., from the 1920’s to the present. In Marita Golden’s Long Distance Life as in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter (1979), most of the couples’s love lives come to an abrupt end by means of death, divorce or a presence of an intruder that is to say another lover between the two spouses. The question of love occupies a central role in the novel in so far as all most all the relationships of the characters are motivated by the issue of love. Women’s predicament in the novel is the outcome of the different aspects of love dealt with by Gloria Naylor.

scholarly journals Gender Trouble and the Tragic Black Woman Hybrids in Clotel, Quicksand and Passing

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 08
Author(s):  
Hayder Naji Shanbooj Alolaiwi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Novels ◽  
True Representation ◽  
Gender Pattern ◽  
Gender Trouble

<p>The African-American female character's description in Clotel, Quicksand and Passing are very impressive, among whom Clotel, Clare and Irene are depicted as one of the most important “passing” figures for the whole story. Though sharing some similarities with the traditional Black women in the past African-American novels, Clotel, Clare and Irene are very different. The strong connection with as well as variations than the usual gender pattern are mixed within these women. It is only by this new approach that the reader can re-think Black woman and build a new African-American female identity. Taking into the consideration an ecofeminist point of view, this paper is going to study the points of similarities with and differences from the traditional Black Women in the novel, unwrap on the developing subject identity of Black women in this novel, in order to prove that in this novel female subject identity is more than a true representation of essentialism and dualism, in a special and unique realistic perspective.</p>

Browning the Dark Princess

Brown Beauty ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 193-224
Author(s):  
Laila Haidarali
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Asian Indian ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
African American Male ◽  
The Political ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Indian Princess

Chapter 5 explores how brownness appeared in Harlem Renaissance fiction as an index of growing sentiments around transnational activism. Focusing on W. E. B. DuBois’s novel, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), this chapter analyzes the novel’s narrative device of brownness with a focus on the representation of an Asian Indian princess as the main female protagonist and love interest of the African American male hero. This chapter also explores DuBois’s intellectualizing on the “race concept”; it highlights the political, social, and legal shifts in understandings of race while considering how these meanings shaped views of New Negro womanhood.

scholarly journals Reunion with Self in Terry McMillan’s I Almost Forgot About You

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-91
Author(s):  
Pradip Nathuram Pawar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
African American Female ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
Feminist Literature ◽  
The Family ◽  
Terry Mcmillan ◽  
Male Companion

The novel I Almost Forgot About You by Terry McMillan, which deals with the problem of finding your own identity by studying the components of personality and the context in the formation of identity, is examined. African American feminist literature consists of common themes like sense of being different, managing multiple selves and quest for identity. Terry McMillans works represent African American female characters struggle for self-realization that help them in better understanding of the present and planning for the future by reestablishing their identity. The predicament of Georgia, protagonist of the novel, is that she has lost selfhood after subsequent divorces. In due course of time, her role in the family becomes diminished; also she loses interest in the professional life. Her aimlessness and strong desire to restore self leads her to search for male companion among her old boyfriends. She believes that self-satisfaction is possible with exploration of self for that she decides to go on a train trip and tries to focus on nurturing the hobby of woodwork. It helps her in regaining her internal and external self. Thus, the leitmotif of the novel is the search for your own identity as an attempt of inquiry for the destined future.

scholarly journals "Aggravatin' Papa": Race, Omission, and Discursive Liminality in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Bosse
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sexual History ◽  
White Female ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
American Character ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Sun Also Rises ◽  
The Sun Also Rises

My essay constructs a postcolonial theoretical framework to investigate a scene in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. The scene suggests that an African-American character--a musician performing the popular jazz song "Aggravatin' Papa"--may share a sexual history with the novel's white female protagonist. The text strategically silences the black character's voice at several moments in the dialogue. By exhuming the musician's lyrics and showcasing the silenced voice in this intertextual relationship, I argue that the marginalized minority voice is, in fact, central to Hemingway’s modernist experimentation. In the very process of its appropriation and silencing in the novel, the black presence bursts forth from its liminal discursive space and intervenes in the narrative’s construction of difference.

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