Rewriting Black Identities Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison - Rebecca Ferguson - Peter Lang - broché - Essai

This book received a Toni Morrison Society Recognition Award The complexity of African-American identities is a central concern in Toni Morrison’s writing. Speaking of «the enormous layers of lives that [black Americans] live,» she has commented that «If I examine those layers, I don’t come up with simple statements.» Drawing on relevant areas of feminist, poststructuralist and race-related theory, this study explores aspects of that complexity, encompassing all eight of her novels to date, including Love (2003). Opening with an exploration of The Bluest Eye (1970) in the light of psychoanalytic theory concerning the relational self, racial identity and the transitional object, it goes on to analyse Morrison’s articulation of changing aspects of black American identity, assessing among other concerns her poetic practice in relation to voice, time, space and memory, her deployment of narrative and generic forms, and her expressive use of intertextual references. This innovative study al