Struggle and Successes of African Americans

Bell hooks has made the insightful remark "images that of race and representation have become a contemporary obsession," yet "little progress is made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking" (4-7). Morrison's use of suppressed popular communicative forms - visual, oral, musical, and more - is, as Trudier Harris has pointed out, an integral part of her uncovering "discredited" knowledge. While this reactivation of local memories is certainly among Morrison's cultural objectives, it is the grounding of her outlook in a "race-specific yet race-free prose" that molds a literary form to the exigencies of racial difference: "My vulnerability," she says, "would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it" (Playing x-xi). In Morrison's narrative project, these cautious remarks take shape in two principal ways: She both dis-articulates African American experience from its place in a system of negative associations in the cultural imaginary of what she terms the American "Africanist" discourse, and she re-articulates the concept of black American experience around the diversity, not the homogeneity, of its historical forms.

First, where the tradition of slave narratives is concerned, Morrison is attentive to silences and gaps in these narratives. She is concerned with things unsaid or unsayable in those narratives of struggle, with how a particular sexual economy and masculinity underpinned the writings of black authors, and with these writers' inability to mine the recesses of memories deemed shameful. We may note in passing the scene in The Bluest Eye in which Pecola is raped by her father, though this scene is related to an earlier one in which the latter was exposed to ridicule by two white men who happened to run into him while he was having his first sexual experience as a boy. ...