scholarly journals Yearning for Beauty. The Expression of Melancholy in Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”

Author(s):  
Aleksandra Kozłowska

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the sources and results of melancholy in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye with reference to Dominick LaCapra’s theory based on a distinction between loss and absence. LaCapra claims that the former concept refers to a particular event, while the latter cannot be identified with any specific point in time or object. What is more, LaCapra admits that absence may result in melancholy, i.e. the state in which the individual remains possessed by a negative emotion because there is no possibility of working it through. The idea of absence causing melancholy is exemplified by the protagonist of The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove. The girl dreams about acquiring blue eyes that belong to the prevailing white model of beauty which excludes African-American features. The feeling of absence is intensified by the U.S. education system aimed at promoting the lifestyle and characteristics of white Americans, her own mother who prefers serving white people to taking care of her own children, and the peers that constantly stigmatize Pecola for ugliness. Consequently, she becomes obsessed with the unattainable blue eyes. Since there is no chance for her to be accepted and thus cope with the absence of white features, the girl suffers from melancholy which leads her to insanity and exclusion from society.

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Brawley ◽  
Chris Dixon

Between 1941 and 1945, as the U.S. military machine sent millions of Americans——and American culture——around the world, several thousand African Americans spent time in Australia. Armed with little knowledge of Australian racial values and practices, black Americans encoutered a nation whose long-standing commitment to the principle of "White Australia" appeared to rest comfortably with the segregative policies commonly associated with the American South. Nonetheless, while African Americans did encounter racism and discrimination——practices often encouraged by the white Americans who were also stationed in Australia during the war——there is compelling evidence that their experiences were not always negative. Indeed, for many black Americans, Australians' apparent open-mindedness and racial views of white Britons and others with whom African Americans came into contact during the war. Making use of U.S. Army censors' reports and paying attention to black Americans' views of their experiences in Australia, this article not only casts light on an aspect of American-Australian relations that has hitherto recieved scant scholarly attention and reveals something about the African American experience, but also offers insights into race relations within the U.S. armed forces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Anisha Dahiya

Ethnicity is one of the most debatable topics in contemporary times. Human culture is divided along ethnic and national lines. Ethnicity and Race function as most powerful language of human difference and human community. An ethnic group that is dominant often tends to make its own culture specific traits normative in that society. The Bluest Eye is one of the landmark novels of Toni Morrison in which the markings of ethnicity play a great role. The aim of this paper is to explore the traces of ethnic discrimination of the African Americans at the hands of dominant White Americans in the novel The Bluest Eye.  It illustrates how ethnic stereotypes propagated by White Americans for their selfish purposes victimised the black people at that time. Particular emphasis is given on the psychological effects of the oppressive environment on the protagonist Pecola. Morrison portrays Pecola as a marginalized and oppressed character who yearns to have blue eyes to have a respectable position in the community.


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Theo Goldberg

Neoconservative lobbyist Grover Norquist has declared that he wishes so to diminish government in the U.S. that he can drown it in a bathtub. This paper will address the ways in which Katrina has laid bare how the neoconservative attack on the state since the early 1980s, and especially in the past five years, has (1) targeted for devastation those public agencies supportive of the racially defined poor, thus rendering them far more vulnerable to disasters, both natural and social; and (2) shifted state resources away from poorer, especially African American and Latino, citizens to the interests of wealthier (and overwhelmingly White) Americans, in effect privatizing the definition and implementation of public programs in the name of “charitable contributions”. This trend has also had the effect of shifting racial discriminations from the public to the private realm, thus making racism less visible and more difficult to address, while at the same time easier to deny in practice.


Author(s):  
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jyoti Narayan Patra ◽  
Jayanta Mete

Values are like seeds that sprout, become saplings, grow into trees and spread their branches all around. To be able to think right, to feel the right kind of emotions and to act in the desirable manner are the prime phases of personality development. Building up of values system starts with the individual, moves on to the family and community, reorienting systems, structures and institutions, spreading throughout the land and ultimately embracing the planet as a whole. The culture of inclusivity is particularly relevant and important in the context of our society, nation and making education a right for all children.


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Samson ◽  
Cheryl L. Allen ◽  
Richard K. Fleischman ◽  
Ida B. Robinson-Backmon

Accounting educators no doubt agree that diversity is an important and much neglected part of accounting education. They further recognize that it is difficult to incorporate this important topic into the accounting curriculum. This paper describes the efforts of various professors to expose business and accounting students to the evolution of diversity issues related to the accounting profession by using the book A White-Collar Profession [Hammond, 2002]. A White-Collar Profession: African-American CPAs Since 1921 is a seminal work which presents a history of the profession as it relates to African-American CPAs and documents the individual struggles of many of the first one hundred blacks to become certified. This paper describes efforts of faculty at four different colleges to utilize this book in their teaching of accounting. Instructors found that students not only developed an enhanced awareness about the history of the accounting profession, but that other educational objectives were advanced, such as improved communication and critical thinking skills, increased social awareness, and empathy for others. African-American students, in particular, embraced the people in the book as role models, while most every student saw the characters as heroic in a day when the accounting profession is badly in need of role models and heroes. This is encouraging given the profession's concern with diversity and the attention and resources directed at increasing the number of minorities entering the profession.


Author(s):  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Michael J. Nelson

We have investigated the differences in support for the U.S. Supreme Court among black, Hispanic, and white Americans, catalogued the variation in African Americans’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities, and examined how those latter two factors shape individuals’ support for the U.S. Supreme Court, that Court’s decisions, and for their local legal system. We take this opportunity to weave our findings together, taking stock of what we have learned from our analyses and what seem like fruitful paths for future research. In the process, we revisit Positivity Theory. We present a modified version of the theory that we hope will guide future inquiry on public support for courts, both in the United States and abroad.


2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 245-256
Author(s):  
Shun-Hsing Chen ◽  
Ching-Chow Yang

Quality function deployment (QFD) is an essential tool in implementing total quality management (TQM). This study applies a Web-QFD approach using group decision-making analysis in the Web environment to reduce the complicated data collection, aggregation and analysis processes. A Web-based questionnaire is designed by using an active service pages (ASP) involving the Internet relay chat (IRC) technique and the Delphi method with Internet (E-Delphi) to determine the importance degree of the customers' requirements. However, the traditional Delphi method is time-consuming mission. This study applies the proposed Web-QFD approach to efficiently gather the individual opinions of each team member, the requirements that are critical for customers, and then enables decision makers to accurately assess the priorities of these requirements. An empirical example of an education system in Taiwan is employed to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed Web-QFD model. This real world example involves team members communicating easily and quickly with other experts in the team through the Internet to accelerate the reaching of a consensus among multiple decision makers regardless of where their location. Customers' requirements can be rapidly prioritized based on the assessment results.


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