BIBLOGRAPHY

Chang, Juliana. “‘I Cannot Find Her’: The Oriental Feminine, Racial Melancholia, and Kimiko Hahn’s ‘The Unbearable Heart.’” Meridians, vol. 4, no. 2, 2004, pp. 239–260. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40338902. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020. Since 2001 Juliana Chang has had the title of Assistant Professor with Santa Clara. Chang  attended UC Berkeley where she received her Ph.D and along with teaching at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at Boston College. Her interest includes Asian American literature,Critical race studies,poetry and Psychoanalysis. Chang published a total of five journals and one book.

Chang in her text  I cannot find her:  The Oriental Feminine and Racial Melancholia . She addresses the inhabitants of the Asian American female in the U.S  national unconscious. Which Chang labels as the oriental feminine. In addition addressing the issues of race, and transnationalism. Referencing Kimiko Hahn’s book of Poetry The Unbearable Heart. Which speaks about a repressed American born Asian woman  “who is a legitimate citizen-subject of the U.S. nation-state, a legible subject of modernity. Upon reading the text it is understood that this subject of modernity and nation remains haunted and stands in places as the“other”:the oriental feminine, which remains outside of modern history and modern subjectivity. “We see how racial difference forms and deforms the inhabitation of a presumably abstract and universal national citizenship.”  Which reflects the same deconstruction in Rankine’s text Citizen An American Lyric.  In her text she addresses the issues of the racial differences and the deterioration of the  metaphorical body. Focusing on the subject of alienation and invisibility.  

Chang opens her argument by criticizing individualism using psychoanalysis to theorize the racial subject. She addresses the imaginary and the symbolic self . As she examines the oriental feminine  proving that it is not only of the  imaginary and symbolic fantasy, but also the site of the traumatic real. This “real” refer to residue, blockage, or excess of the symbolic. The real has to be dismissed from our symbolic universe so that we can maintain a solid sense of reality. Along with the displacement of the traditional subject in order to cope . This is the result of a traumatic experience . Thus making the traumatized subject unable to place herself into a symbolic narrative such as history. In “Citizen “  this sense of displacement is present as we see the use of  pronouns such as “You” instead of the first person “I” . Which perhaps the subject has actually placed herself in the title “ Citizen” rather than in the text herself. As a way to become a symbol of the present. Creating that disillusion of the “self self” not existing  within the text itself. 

Costello, Bonnie. “Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address by Natalie Pollard (review).” Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.), vol. 20, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 149–51, doi:10.1353/mod.2013.0003. Costello Bonnie is a well renowned English professor at the Boston University . She is also an American literary scholar. In addition she has published several literary works such as her book on Marianme Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. In addition, academic books and articles,  and published literary essays on art.

Bonnie reviews the text “ Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public . In the text she addresses the  intimacy of lyric poetry . This is often the poet having a private conversation  with his or herself. With the aim to inform ,persuade or to teach an audience. She argues that there is a shift from lyric subjectivity to lyric address. Supporting this  with references of other literary analysis such as Barbara Johnson, Will Waters, Helen Vendler,and others that have looked at the paradoxes, intimacies, and ambiguities of speaking to “you.” Along with Natalie Pollard  who studies the subject in connection with the second person plural and public address. Which she identifies in this “study is that “you,” is not a quiet, receptive projection of the poet’s desire, but often a complex and resistant imagined other, conscious of real others.”Pollard  argues  that the “civic role” of poetry  has been neglected and overemphasized . Along with the isolation of the lyric speaker and the fictional nature of the addressed other. “She reminds us, contemporary Poetry attempts to reclaim poetic language, not as primarily set-apart speech, but as a predominantly public act” (6). These poets often specify their addressees, and they do not shy away from topical address or even from politics taken in local, historical, or broader ideological terms.” Pollard according to Bonnie argues that language  is a platform that poet’s use as  subjective control. “Yous” are in turn used as a symbol  to address invading figures, and readers  that it is not a peaceful negotiation. “ Itinvolves a great deal of echoing and crossing, misbehaving and appropriating, not with the aim of jouissance, but in the search for some kind of communal real.” Which explains why Rankine in her text “Citizen “ displaced the first person. She was trying to convey a message that could only be received by her being radical.

Rankine, Claudia. “Toyin Ojih Odutola.” Aperture, no. 223, 2016, pp. 66–69., www.jstor.org/stable/43825325. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.Claudia Rankine  was born in  Jamaica in 1963 . She attended College where she earned her BA in English and then she attended Columbia University where she obtained her MFA in Poerty. Rankine is the author of several collections, such as  Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press, 2020); Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Book Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry. She has edited several anthologies, such as  The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015), American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics(Wesleyan University Press, 2007), and American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language . In 2013, Rankine given the position of  Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has also went to  achieve many awards and honors. A few of these  honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National 2016, Rankine was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and named a United States Artists Zell fellow in literature. In 2017, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, a “a moving collaboration with other collectives, spaces, artists, and organizations towards art exhibitions, readings, dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that engage the subject of race.” She is currently a Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings engage, destroy, highlight, and ultimately privilege a new grammar for blackness. Using black ballpoint, graphite, pastel, and charcoal, Odutola is the  representation of an open-ended image construction, before  one’s identity is formed. It focuses on the uniqueness and individuality for example, its shapes, tonality, and line . Whose particular face we are traveling toward rarely is the point. What is important is not the specific identity of the subject but the cumulative buildup of line that brings weight, complexity, and mobility to her images. It is here—in the line—thatc Odutola’s genius lives. dark line and its repetition reimagines terrain—marking and thereby making blackness unfamiliar as it accumulates into flesh to be read as racially significant or not.

“Odutola’s portraits explore how to desegregate blackness from a fixed racial position and open it out to all the mythology, missteps, racism, beauty, and life that is held by the term, while still landing it within the free space of bodies. She engages blackness as a field of tonality. Her system of layering tones moves not toward the real but toward an alternative privileging of fluidity within the line.” Which Claudia Rankine seems to aim for in her novel “Citizen”. Rankine separates  her subjects from the black body in aid to dismiss the idea of blackness. Thus, the dismissal of the representation of the first person “I”. Instead, she wishes to be seen for her humanity. Not for the color of her skin but for who she is as a person. Moreover,  who her brothers and sisters are. Instead they should be seen for their talents, ambition, kindness etc. The  issues of labels has been the problem throughout history. It continues to form division and justification  for the dehumanization of a race.  The best way to coexist is to remove the boarders that divides us as human beings.

Sastri, Reena. “Rita Dove’s Poetic Expeditions.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2012, pp. 90–116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41698770. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020. Dove  an African American poet , who founded passion in poetry and music at a tender age. Dove studied in Germany after gaining a Full bright Scholarship. After studying in Germany she went Arizona State University where she taught creative writing. She won several awards for her work, such as 1987 Pulitzer Prize for the book of poetry Thomas and Beulah. Dove also taught at the University of Virginia and became a award winning poet. After which she published chapbooks early in her career . Thus  earning a role with collections like The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) . In  May of 1993, Dove was named the poet laureate of the United States, at the age of 41.

Rita Dove believes its ass-backwards to think that there is a Black way of writing and a white”. In her opinion  there should be no limitations  of  the primary illustration of themes , idioms or stance. In her poems she uses  “I”  not only as a rift between social boundaries, but has a way to expand it’s context. Identifying that the lyric self is not bound to one set structure. This “I” is unsettled further by the ghosts of the poetic past, a haunting revealed both as willed by the poet adopting literary lineages, and as received by the writer open to the otherness of the creative process. Gesturing by these means outward from the embodied sociohistorical self, she anticipates recent work on the way the poetic “I,” in its resistance to stable self-definition, can offer a politically salutary alternative to politicized identity.”Rankine in her text “Citizen”  shifts  from the use of “I” to demonstrate the the self is no longer stable. Due the the trauma of the historical self. She avoids the use of I to also avoid a specific identification. To show equality rather than division. Based on her protest against racial in justice, discrimination , micro aggressions. The dismissal of the first person “I” is to reflect that we all are apart of the same body.

SLEIGH, TOM. “Self as Self-Impersonation in American Poetry.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 82, no. 1, 2006, pp. 174–189. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26443930. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.Tom Sleigh is the author of  Self as Self impersonation in American Poetry .  He is an  essayist and american poet,  and resides in New York City. Sleigh is the publisher of nine poetry pieces and two essay books. Some of his recent work entails House of Fact, House of Ruin . Sleigh has also obtained many awards, such as 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Academy Award, and the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America to name a few. Tom Sleigh obtains a position as Hunter College’s director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing.

The Self as Self impersonation in American poetry  speaks about the fallen consciousness is brought to God’s light by the fire of faith, and the self that suffers the flames is all the better for the scorching. As he relays a story of his older brother hitting a reverend in the back of his head with a water balloon. This had the reverend in rage and his quest was to punish the “little sinner” as  stated by the novel . Sleigh then went ahead to compare this situation with that of Saul the Christian prosecutor and how God knocked him off his horse. He was reborn as Paul the apostle. In the whole situation Sleigh’s biggest concern was the horse and  if the horse also suffered from the blow. In addition he asked the question of whether Paul was a better master than Saul. In which he then questioned identity, how it’s created , and what factors play in its existence as it regards to poetry .

Sleigh speaks about the different types of poets such as a language poet, autobiographical poet and narrative poet and the controversy surrounding the issue. In his opinion he doesn’t see why a poet can not take on all three identities. Without dealing with the issues of cultural debate and the world of poetry. He speaks about the “cultural and critical theory in which “I” is both a grammatical project and projection of systems of power, and the almost pre-literate hostility that some poetic scribblers feel toward any attempt to call the authority of “I”into  question. Sleigh then goes into the history of American imaginative writing. Which  was all started byAnne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. Sleigh speaks about the Burning house  written by Anne Bradstreet’s . As she aimed to use her own persona as a vehicle to proselytize and self-admonishments . Along with her use of the second and third person pronouns to address the “mighty Architect” and keep him at a slight grammatical remove. Which she does in a way to address her house and the issues within her house. In this poem her use of the second and third person was a way of  cutting loose from her physical body . This made Bradstreet more able to explore her subconscious and bring her deep feelings and desires to surface . As illustrated in the text “She splits off from the sorrowing self in order to admonish that self, and in the process the “I” sanctioned by the divine principle has begun to split along the grain.”  A  similarity can be placed with Citizen An American lyric  by Claudia Rankine. In this novel Rankine also uses the same second and third person pronouns. Almost making the self in existence as she talks about the issues of micro aggression and racism in America. For Rankine to be able to truly speak from an unbiased self she had to step within herself. Thus becoming an objective source speaking for those around her rather than herself

MORRISON, TONI. BLUEST EYE. VINTAGE CLASSICS, 2007.

Stern, Katherine. “Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula.” The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable, by Marc Cameron. Conner, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002, pp. 77–91.

-Stern discusses Morrison’s contempt and uncertainty towards the idea of “Black is beautiful”. In her essay, Stern shows how Morrison draws our attention away from the visual object, towards an experience of physical beauty that is tangible through efforts to feel as well as see versus the imaginary definition that is expressed in media, in which Morrison condemns.

“HARLEM’S ‘NATURAL SOUL’: Selling Black Beauty to the Diaspora in the Early 1960s.” Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, by Tanisha C. Ford, University of North Carolina Press, 2015, pp. 41–66. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469625164_ford.6. Accessed 24 Nov. 2020.

-This chapter focuses on the rise of black beauty and figures in the 1960’s. It discusses the transformations from natural beauty to the start of the wig culture, as well as the issues that arose from the conflicting markets. Although set in Harlem, it provides perspective on the subject of beauty and its evolution, as well as assimilation into a whiter definition of beauty.

Morrison, Toni. “WHY I WROTE THE BLUEST EYE – An Interview With Toni Morrison.” Youtube.com, 8 Aug. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0JkI3F6z-Y. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.

-In this interview, Toni Morrison discusses her reasoning for writing The Bluest Eye. She mentions her previous work in publishing and her love for books, by then talking about the importance of her own writing and the process in which she developed the characters for the novel.

Werrlein, Debra T. “Not so Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in the Bluest Eye.” MELUS, vol. 30, no. 4, 2005, pp. 53–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30029634. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.

-Werrlein dissects the ideas presented in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in contrast to the popular Dick & Jane books of the time, as well as the depiction of childhood crisis that grew popular in media. Werrlein acknowledges the socioeconomic reasoning that factors in to Toni Morrison’s commentary on the “ugliness” of blackness.

“5 A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness:the Production of the Black Body/Self and the Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” What White Looks like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, by George Yancy, Routledge, 2004, pp. 107–138, ebookcentral.proquest.com.

-Yancy explores blackness as the subject of white knowledge. He delves into the “European imaginary” and how it defined blackness, bringing in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye into the discussion. Yancy dissects the ideals of beauty and its internalized reflection in the black community.

The fifth situation from Section VI of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is dedicated specifically to the memory of Trayvon Martin. The very basic definition of “situation” is “a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself; a state of affairs.” The reason why Rankine calls these texts “situations” is because of how she writes about her subjects. What they go through is not, by any means, their fault. Rather, they are thrown into these circumstances that are beyond their control simply because of the racism and profiling they face because they are black. It is clear that the main character of this particular situation, Trayvon Martin, therefore “found himself” in the circumstances that ultimately ended with his death. 

However, the text could (unfortunately) also apply to many other black men who were unjustly discriminated upon, as she calls upon her “brothers” from the many eras America has gone through, ranging from “the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling” – all eras where black men have suffered, both physically and mentally, through the same racism that Trayvon Martin faced. This shows that racism has not changed even as the times did. Rankine depicts how black boys learn about the differences in treatment that they will face through her film. Throughout the entire video, a black man is staring out the window of a moving car and is watching what is going on outside. When Rankine talks about the childhood of a black boy in the beginning, she refers to it as “steep steps into a collapsing mind,” as the black man watches a seemingly happy childhood play out in front of him, where a black boy, perhaps himself, is playing on the beach with his father. This implies that the naive bliss this black boy is feeling is about to go away soon, as he descends down the steps of what Rankine calls a “collapsing mind.” This gives a strong visual of how the black mind is, essentially, broken over time.

This brokenness is slowly beginning to show as the black man’s views out his window quickly change and he now finds himself looking at scenes like police brutality, Malcolm X, and a noose hanging from a tree. This is a stark difference from when he was looking at a boy living a happy childhood. Now, the audience can assume that this boy has grown older and is now becoming more aware of his skin color and how he is treated differently and unfairly because of it. In other words, his mind is slowly starting to collapse, as Rankine had put it. 

The text “reads” differently when viewing it as a film rather than reading it as just a book. When I first read Rankine’s passage, it did not really make sense to me. However, the scene I mentioned is what brought her message together. The video combined with the text allows the audience to literally see what is going on from the point of view of a black man. The audience is directly able to see this walk from point A, where a black boy is innocent and happy, to point B, where he grows up and witnesses acts of racism that forces him to quickly learn the injustices that come with being black. I was able to see someone grow up and watch racism through someone else’s perspective – from Trayvon Martin’s perspective.

Burcar, Lilijana. “Imploding the Racialized and Patriarchal Beauty Myth through the Critical Lens of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Vestnik za tuje jezike 9.1 (2017): 139–158. Web.

The article brings up the racialized beauty norms from gender to race.It brings into light the societal norms and rules and how this affects people.

Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010, pp. 147–170. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20749587. Accessed 11 Nov. 2020.

This article goes into further detail about the structures of racism and its effects. How appearance affects racism and how we can apply this to real-life scenarios.

Koch, E. “Hollywood’s Terror Industry: Idealized Beauty and The Bluest Eye.” Sanglap : journal of literary and cultural inquiry 1.1 (2014): 147–. Print.

This article goes into a lot of detail about the perception of social standards for beauty and Hollywood. It focuses on the 1940s American white cultural hegemony from Morrison’s characters: Claudia, Pauline, and Pecola.

Muhi, Ridha. “The Quest for an Ideal Beauty in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” مجلة كلية التربية للبنات 21.2 (2019): n. pag. Print.

The article talks about racialized beauty and its effects on black youth. How the construction of femininity in a racialized structure affects women when the standard of beauty is white.

Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010, pp. 147–170. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/20749587. Accessed 11 Nov. 2020.

• Jerome Bump explores the emotive qualities the come with understanding racism. By explaining the emotions that come with racism these emotions become more accessible which explain the beauty standards experienced by all black girls in the novel. This article specifically looks at the fears that come with judging people based on their appearance in The Bluest Eye and uses Morrison’s literature to help more people identify with racism by starting the battle in the classroom. In my paper I will use this article as a basis to understand racism and to provide a look into why different sections of the black community and society at large view their beauty differently.

Long, Lisa A. “A New Midwesternism in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye.’” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 59, no. 1, 2013, pp. 104–125. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24247112.Accessed 11 Nov. 2020.

• Lisa Long discusses the white/light skinned perspective in the Bluest Eye by comparing it to other Midwestern books in its cannon. This will be helpful to define the different standards of beauty white people face and the irony that every standard of beauty has a different standard it looks up to making beauty itself unachievable. This article proves that although members in the black community judge each other based on their class and skin tone they are judged more broadly by the white community as a whole and then the subtleties in their skin color doesn’t make much of a difference.

Mahaffey, Paul Douglas. “The Adolescent Complexities of Race, Gender, and Class in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye.’” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 11, no. 4, 2004, pp. 155–165. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43496824. Accessed 11 Nov. 2020.

• This article solidifies the different beauty standards experienced by different tones of blackness. It also further extrapolates how class relates to beauty with an in depth discussion of Maureen Peal, a light skinned wealthy black girl who thought she was better than Claudia and Pecola calling them black and ugly. This proves the racial hierarchy within the black community where black girls treat other black girls with disrespect because they have a shade lighter skin tone and more money thus conforming to white beauty standards that leave them out from the start.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye; a Novel. [1st ed.]. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.Print.

• The chapters on Maureen interacting with Claudia and Pecola explain the differences between beauty with different shades of blackness. Using quotes from the novel will solidify the theory that many of the other journalist have wrote about. In addition, movie scenes described by Morrison show societal beauty standards and that even though there is nuance in the eyes of light skinned black girls white society as a whole thinks all black people are black and ugly.

Walther, Malin LaVon. “Out of Sight: Toni Morrison’s Revision of Beauty.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 24, no. 4, 1990, pp. 775–789. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3041802.Accessed 11 Nov. 2020.

• Malin LaVon Walther discusses beauty standards experienced by all kinds of black people especially women which is helpful as a base for the validity of beauty standards in society. Walther argues that by rejecting white consumer beauty Morrison idealizes the reality of beauty in relation to racial identity and releases Pecola from invisibility. The work Pecola must do to remove herself from white beauty standards strips away every piece of her individuality which proves that black women don’t feel like they can be themselves and be beautiful in a white society.

Zebialowicz, Anna, and Marek Palasinski. “Probing Racial Dilemmas in ‘the Bluest Eye’ with the Spyglass of Psychology.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2010, pp. 220–233. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41819247. Accessed 11 Nov. 2020.

• Anna Zebialowicz uses psychology to explain the behavior of women in relation to their sex, race and class in The Bluest Eye. Psychology is used as a method of validating the thoughts emotions and behaviors of the characters in Morrison’s novel by comparing their issues to modern issues of race in society. Zebialowicz, argues that this approach will help explore the hybridization of race gender and class in the black community which will help explain how beauty standards affects each facet of the black women in the novel.

When researching this subject, I found many articles related to societal beauty standards in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I choose to focus on first establishing the validity of beauty standards in the black community and normalizing their change when viewed by difference tones of blackness. I then related this concept to the black community as a whole rather than facets of it to explain how white society imposes beauty standards on all black people even if light skinned, rich black people like Maureen Peal see themselves as superior. By establishing both of these facts I am able to focus on the nuances of societal beauty standards imposed on different shades of blackness while incorporating socioeconomic status to achieve a fuller picture of the psychological experience of the characters in The Bluest Eye.