Oppression and resistance in the fiction of Toni Morrison: issues of race and gender

Abstract

The situation of oppression black people, and particularly black women,have experienced in the United States has been portrayed in the fiction of Afro-American writer Toni Morrison, whose novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Song ofSolomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) challenge white male hegemonic power Morrison not only reconstructs this world of oppression but at the same timecreates strategies that dismantle such oppressive world order. The approach ofthe present study combines a perspective that draws on post-colonial and Afro-American studies and criticism together with feminist and black feministconcerns. The challenging subversive strategies identified in the three novelsstudied involve the revision and re-characterization of the female role; thedeconstruction of family models embedded in a racist and patriarchal societyand the problematization of the construction of historical knowledge and itsimplication in the building of a cultural past. Morrison`s fiction destabilizes "ahabit of seeing" that works to perpetuate domination and impose an oppressivesilence. In so doing, Morrison`s novels stand as an act of resistance, asubversive transformation of silence into voice, of absence into presence.