Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.

Many of Toni Morrison's African-American characters attempt to change their circumstances either by embracing the white dominant culture that surrounds them or by denying it. In this thesis I explore several ways in which the characters do just that-either embrace or deny the white culture's right to dominion over them. This thesis deals primarily with five of Toni Morrison's novels: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, Sula, and Tar Baby.

Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both novels have protagonists that struggle with racism, sexism, and classism as barriers to their identity formation. This study aims to reveal the ways in which multiple layers of oppression inhibit the progress of contemporary African-American female heroines in modem Bildungsroman. / Graduation date: 2002

Calls to protect Black women have garnered national attention, drawing attention to the axes of racialized and gendered violence that are central to this dissertation project: the intersecting mis/recognition of Black women’s vulnerability and affect within and outside of their own racial communities constrains their possibilities to seek repair and justice for harm. Baltimore community members used social media platforms to call attention to gendered violence, joining movements like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Tarana Burke’s #MeToo Movement to address the erasure of violent experiences of Black women and girls; yet the mis/recognition of their affective experiences persists through the societal focus on Black male vulnerability. Through careful ethnographic study with Baltimorean anti-gendered violence activists, Black gendered violence survivors, and Black community healers, this dissertation analyzes how these women and non-binary people mobilize emotions to construct memorial spaces, community-based movements, and their own lives in the midst of pervasive state and interpersonal violence. I investigate the affective and political processes of Black urban place-making, self-making, and memorialization to answer: How do Black women define their own subjectivity at the intersections of antiblack and gendered violence? How does their political mobilization of emotions such as fear and grief transform gendered and racialized understandings of affect? To answer these questions, I use a Black feminist care practice to examine the themes of haunting, violence, home, and care and to conceptualize new analytic tools for writing about violence against Black women. The first chapter of my dissertation undertakes a Black feminist reading of ethnographic interview data, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), examining themes of reproduction, violence, and slavery’s afterlife that ripple from the novels’ pages to my and my interlocutors’ lives. I locate the haunting inside and outside of the Black female body, and I discuss the particular way that Black trans life illuminates that haunting. In my second chapter, I explore the (im)possibility of gendered Black affect through a Black feminist mapping of the myriad practices Black people use to create home as a transitory, affective, symbolic, and metamorphic place. This chapter employs autoethnography and interlocutor photographs of emotional sites as analytical and methodological tools to answer its driving questions. The third chapter discusses Black gendered memorialization practices for victims of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence. I develop my conceptualization of imagined (after)life and self power using ethnographic and archival data, using the aftermath of Korryn Gaines’s and Breonna Taylor’s state-sanctioned murders as primary texts. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation focuses on Black anti-gendered violence activism and its challenges and failures in Baltimore. By examining the lived experiences of Black activist-organizers, I highlight the complexities inherent in the pursuit of Black liberation. Using a Black feminist abolitionist framework, I analyze photographs, art, and poetry from local artist-activists to illustrate how (after)lives of interpersonal violence survivors can be made radical. My analysis of the affective experiences of Black women and nonbinary people in Baltimore and the gendered politics of grievability in Black anti-violence movements ultimately demonstrates how these movements re-entrench white supremacist patriarchal norms that undermine the pursuit of Black liberation. Thus, we must turn to Black feminist abolitionist praxis to achieve liberation for all Black people.

The thesis investigates the ways in which James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison’s fictional portrayals of forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are excluded or prohibited by social norms, destabilise heteronormativity as the only legitimate option for non-harmful and pleasurable sensual and sexual expression. It aims to situate Baldwin, Walker and Morrison in a continuum of African American authors, beginning with Harlem Renaissance writer Bruce Nugent – the first African American writer to openly explore the relationship between homosexuality and Blackness – that have examined the intertwining issues of transgressive sexuality and race in increasingly explicit ways. By highlighting the ways in which Baldwin, Walker and Morrison decentre heteronormativity, the project aims to uncover how their novels expose the systems of power and knowledge by which racial forms of oppression are maintained, thereby debunking both the notion of Black “authenticity” and Black sexual stereotypes. Finally, the project hopes to show how the process of “queering” heteronormativity in these ways effectively serves to legitimise all forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are non-harmful, opening up a new trajectory for contemporary twentieth-century authors who delve into these themes. Theoretical Approach: The thesis will argue for a queer reading of Baldwin, Walker and Morrison’s novels that underscores the writers’ treatment of sexuality as a discursive construct. Specifically, this theoretical perspective looks to their legitimisation of alternative forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are non-harmful – a process that, in each case, serves to counteract and denaturalise White heteronormativity as the only rightful option for sexual desire and practice. Through this approach, the thesis strives to reveal how by working to legitimise such taboo expressions, these writers deconstruct the idea of the “other” as aberrant, thus calling attention to the specific political and moral systems by which love, eroticism and sexuality are judged in the modern Western world. Chapter Break Down: Chapters one and two of the project situate my argument in the context of critical earlier American writing encompassing canonical fiction, including political protest and African American folklorist novels, political polemics, Puritan captivity narratives, slave narratives, political essays, and experimentalist fiction. Together, these chapters provide a detailed overview of discourses surrounding sexuality, considering what is socially determined to be sexually “perverse” as a shifting concept, the meaning of which changes in tandem with changes in social and historical context. They also extensively analyse Black cultural specificity, examining both the sociological genesis of Black sexual stereotypes that led in part to the justification of the modern slave trade and the subsequent impact of slavery on African American sexual practices. In chapter three, the literary analysis begins with a consideration of the broadened possibilities of sexual acceptability Baldwin puts forth in his anti-protest style of fiction, by examining relationships between characters that do not fit conventional racial or sexual stereotypes, their social contexts, and the narrative perspectives employed by the author. Chapter four examines how Walker’s work carries forward Baldwin’s ideas, by further opening up the spectrum of socially acceptable forms of love, eroticism and sexuality through her presentation of an even wider array of erotically transgressive characters, and her effort to write about them during sustained periods of American conservatism. In chapter five, I examine how Morrison complicates the traditional understanding of what constitutes legitimate sexuality by infusing positive elements into sensual and sexual acts that appear to be nothing other than violent, illegal or psychologically regressive, thereby exposing the impact of social and historical context on the individual, further emphasising the changing and discursive nature of sexuality. The thesis finally argues that Baldwin, Walker and Morrison’s particular depictions of alternative sexuality roll back into a bigger idea of human experience that claims as necessary a re-thinking of social norms based on ethical considerations, rather than arbitrary social codes of morality that lead to both racial and sexual discrimination. Their novels thus ultimately involve us in human issues of justice and responsibility beyond the boundaries of race and sexuality.

This thesis examines the links between and intersections of violence and subjectivity in a comparative, transatlantic and transnational study of the fiction of four recognized international authors, namely, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, J. M. Coetzee, and Yvonne Vera. Despite their differing geographical, temporal, cultural and socio-political situations and situatedness, these writers’ common, thematic concerns with taboo topics of violence such as rape, incest, infanticide and necrophilia, situate violence as a constitutive, intimate and intricate part of subjectivity. In providing varied, and not unproblematic, renderings of the mutuality of violence and subjectivity, their novels do not just reveal the ambiguous and ambivalent character and the fragile and tenuous processes of (exercising and asserting) subjectivity; their fiction enacts and engenders its own kind of textual violence that reflects and refracts the (metaphysical and epistemological) violence of the subjective process. Raising crucial questions about the place, role and efficacy of literature in articulating violence and subjectivity, this thesis argues that violence is meaningful to and constitutive of the subjective process in these authors’ works that offer an experiential, lived appreciation of subjectivity. Providing an historical and socio-political contextualization of the novels, the thesis maintains that these authors’ specific interpretations of violence in their fiction necessarily interrogates and reconfigures questions of race and culture, gender and sexuality, as well as morality; that is, it reexamines and repositions conventional interpretations of being and belonging, of subjectivity in general. In this way, their fiction reveals literature’s ability not merely to disprove theory but, through its very textuality, extend and enhance it to reflect the materiality of being.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-251). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 2, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation comprises a literary investigation of the way in which Toni Morrison is able to transcend stereotypes associated with African American masculinity within a selection of her works namely, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Paradise. I apply Carl Jung’s transcendent concept of the paradoxical Self as a lens through which to analyse Morrison’s different representations, illustrating how this concept affects the formation of identity and an understanding of masculinity. I also make use of Frantz Fanon, who suggests that Jung’s concept of the Self is a way in which black men are able to understand their experience of the world, in that such an experience is paradoxical in nature. It is this paradoxical experience of the world that I argue Morrison highlights in her male characters. In examining Morrison’s representations of masculinity, I also illustrate the intersection of race and gender and how this intersection affects identity creation, given the unique position that African American men occupy within American society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.