[By Kenton Rambsy] Over the course of the past year, Toni Morrison has been a major focus for HBW blog posts as we seek to foster engaged scholarship on black novels. Morrison writer has become a totem of black literature since her 1970 novel debut with The Bluest Eye. Since then, Morrison has been the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (1987), a Nobel Prize in […]
[By Kenton Rambsy] This May, Nobel Prize Winning writer Toni Morrison released her 10th novel, Home. The relatively short novel (approximately 160 pages) offers alternative visions of American history focusing on racial and social tensions after the Korean War. Set in the 1950s, the novel disrupts the popular historical narrative that this period in America was characterized by national harmony and prosperity. Morrison describes the […]
[By Kenton Rambsy] In recent weeks, numerous blog sites, newspapers, and other online forums have been buzzing talking about Jay-Z and Beyonce’s daughter, Blue Ivy. These sites have commented on the name and its significance to the superstar couple, with many saying since their favorite number is “4” the name “Ivy” is a play off of the roman numeral. The emphasis on “Blue Ivy” made […]
[By Goyland Williams] “Break It Down” is an HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems. This week, Blog Contributor Goyland Williams has analyzed an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. P. 206 Oh, some of us “loved” her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I’m sure he did. He, at any […]
[By Goyland Williams] The same year The Bluest Eye (1970) was published, the Black Power Movement and other black struggles for liberation of the 1960s had influenced black literature significantly. Central to those movements’ message was the emphasis of loving and valuing blackness. Because of this, Toni Morrison describes in a interview why The Bluest Eye having “a little hurt black girl at […]
[By Professor Jerry Ward] Having made proposals about the continual and continuous Africanist presence in the American literary imagination, Toni Morrison positions herself to be questioned about the invisible presence of an other, neither black nor white, which does or should haunt the American use of language. Should the case be otherwise, it would have to be claimed that the truly invisible other has been […]
Please leave your thoughts in the comment section [By Kenton Rambsy] Tony Bolden, author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, proposes “vernacular cultures are always dialogic relative to dominant cultures, so they are never static but rather always in flux…writers (artists) who appropriate the vernacular must confront the constant risk of erasure” (26). Bolden’s concept of the ever-changing vernacular culture helps to […]