Author Archives: Carissa Scantlebury

Annotated Bibliography

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Research Question: What does Toni Morrison mean, in her novel The Bluest Eye, that the Breedloves put on their ugliness like a garment? Or that ugliness can be adopted or done away with, when she writes: “Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness… was behavior, the rest of the family… wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them (38).”

 

  1. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 777–795. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343197.
  • Foucault writes on how one becomes a subject, using his discussion on power acquisition as a springboard.
  • This helps build an argument for how the self is created

  1. 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.

 

  • Mahaffey expounds upon the themes I wish to address in my essay, in particular the intersectional (race,gender,class) depiction of Pecola – the ways in which her desire to be white (the have blue eyes) leads to her destruction, whereas Claudia and her sister are able to avoid such a fate and become fully formed subjects.
  • This would do well to answer my prompt, in that I can see an academic perspective on the subjectification of young women as they learn to make their way in the world (within the novel itself).

 

  1. Burt, Janeula M., Halpin, Glennelle. “African American Identity Development: A Review of the Literature.” Mid-South Educational Research Association. November 1998.
  • This gives a look into the discourse relating to African-American depictions in literature – what and how these stereotypes are made (the “ugliness” stereotype that Morrison writes about in The Bluest Eye (38-39).
  • This provides some historical background to how African-Americans are perceived in literature, what their purposes were in their narratives (like “Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary explains – asking why an African-American is needed in a particular work of art rather than who has the right to write about race.

  1.  Brittian, Aerika S. “Understanding African American Adolescents’ Identity Development: A Relational Developmental Systems Perspective.” The Journal of black psychology vol. 38,2 (2011): 172-200. doi:10.1177/0095798411414570.

 

  • This gives added insight into identity development like Foucault, but more specifically for African American Adolescents.
  • This gives specificity to my argument about young African American subject formation from the more malleable teenage years into self-realized adulthood.

Simple Bibliography

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Research Question: What does Toni Morrison mean, in her novel The Bluest Eye, that the Breedloves put on their ugliness like a garment? Or that ugliness can be adopted or done away with, when she writes: “Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness… was behavior, the rest of the family… wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them (38).”

 

  1. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 777–795. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343197.

 

I found this article in an odd sort of way in that I thought the idea of forming a “subject” was so vague and yet so specific a topic that Foucault must have written an article about it. I then put into a BING.com search bar “Foucault how do you become a subject” and the name of this article (or rather afterward to a book he had written) was the first result beneath the author’s Wikipedia page. I then went into JSTOR and found that exact article.

 

  1. 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.

 

I found this article on JSTOR by searching “The Bluest Eye”.

 

  1. Burt, Janeula M., Halpin, Glennelle. “African American Identity Development: A Review of the Literature.” Mid-South Educational Research Association. November 1998.

 

Again, I had found this source in the bibliography of another article I had searched for a separate English class, and when I could not find it in any of the databases we discussed in the library, I searched for the article by typing in the title into the BING.com search bar. I found a link for the entire speech (the reading of a paper the authors had written) that was published in 1998.

 

  1.  Brittian, Aerika S. “Understanding African American Adolescents’ Identity Development: A Relational Developmental Systems Perspective.” The Journal of black psychology vol. 38,2 (2011): 172-200. doi:10.1177/0095798411414570.

 

This article was listed in the BING search results of the article above.

Research Question

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What does Toni Morrison mean, in her novel The Bluest Eye, that the Breedloves put on their ugliness like a garment? Or that ugliness can be adopted or done away with, when she writes: “Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness… was behavior, the rest of the family… wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them (38).”

I Was Born

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            In at least two of the essays we’ve read so far, the authors have annotated the first time in their lives when they realized they were different, or that they were “Other” than what was widely acceptable. These essays include “The Souls of Black Folk,” by W.E.B. Dubois, and “The Fact of Blackness,” by Frantz Fanon. Similar to the slave narrative literary device of writing “I was born…” at the beginning of each narrative, these moments attempt (and succeed) in humanizing the authors and in turn the subject of the black body. All humans have a beginning, all of them are born from a family, all of them have values, and have the sense of self that the word “I” entails. DuBois and Fanon describe their state of consciousness before they came to the realization of their “otherness,” in pan-palatable ways, so that there is a lack of racial “inscription” they write upon themselves; in other words, they write themselves as the “every-person” for whom race isn’t a discriminating entity in their lives, up until a certain point.

         Fanon writes of a harsh realization of his otherness when he looked at himself through the eyes of Caucasians. “The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other…Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world… And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes… The real world challenged my claims.” (Fanon) Although having fought for equality implies inequality, realizing his otherness came about later in life, when the world would “challenge” his claims of sameness. It represents a turning point in the way Fanon saw himself as a objectified in the Caucasian Western gaze. It implies that racism is a construct, a man-made ideology used to subjugate and partition people, and that otherness is not a natural phenomena (within humankind). If it were natural, it would not have to be taught or realized – there would be no need for a cognitive shift.

           On the part of DuBois, he dictates his first encounter with otherness when he was a young boy interacting with a young Caucasian girl his age who refuses to accept a card he made because of his skin color.  “It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first burst upon me, all in a day… The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card…Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others…” (DuBois) Before it “dawned” upon DuBois that he was different, he describes a typical “boyhood” and innocence. Similar to Canon’s account, a first-hand reality check began the fermentation process of otherness and separation from “good”.

           We’ve seen delicate and careful rhetoric in both W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” and Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” in which both authors write on their first experience of racism; or awareness of their “blackness”. These accounts conclude that racism is unnatural and that every human being is inherently and irrevocably the same.

Implicit Inscription

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            It seems as though Chesnutt’s work contains a reverse transaction of inscription upon the Caucasian body by the Black subject (now power-holder) instead of the typical way of Caucasian inscription upon a Black body. He structures the latter by posing Uncle Julius, a former slave, as the principal storyteller and wordsmith in these vignettes and his new employers, Annie and John, as his willful participants in this inscription. It closely resembles the inscription of the Condemned Man by the apparatus in Kafka’s “The Penal Colony” in notable ways.

           The Caucasian listeners happen to be the descendants (possibly the grandchildren) of former Southern plantation and slave owners. They barely make any interinjections while Uncle Julius is sharing his long and well-paced stories about the inner lives of Black slaves that would never have been heard otherwise. He gives insight to character structure and plot to the point of art form. Chesnutt doesn’t even mention any details about the designated listeners; not even an uncomfortable shuffle, or mention of the predominate layer of the setting (whether sitting in a grassy area, or at the woodcutter’s). They are willing participants in this inscription, not like the Condemned Man in Franz Kafka’s “The Penal Colony.”

           What exactly Uncle Julius inscribes upon Annie and her husband includes the structure of power and influence within the slave community in order to affect their white owners and overseers, such as voodoo (“goopher”) and careful storytelling (Uncle Julius and the barn). A friendly exchange between two Caucasian people and an African-American would never have happened before this time period, which makes this moment of inscription remarkable and fragile. Uncle Julius also inscribes upon them to be witnesses to this pain and lack of autonomy that he has experienced first-hand and through those around him; in order to make an impression upon them.

           Kafka’s “The Penal Colony” includes a society which wishes to make a similar impression upon their criminals. In the case of the Condemned Man, he was placed within a torture device whose schematics write a message into the skin of the law-breaker, in a language that the Condemned cannot read or write. It’s believed that the very act of inscription upon the body will transfer the wisdom of right-action in order to correct the character of the Condemned. The characters of Annie and John Chesnutt’s tales do not exhibit the same unwillingness that the Condemned Man has when he realizes he’s about to die, but the inscription of right-action is written implicitly upon Annie and John  rather than explicitly. These stories clearly frame out the life of a slave, to hearers who are tied to the very people who benefited monetarily and otherwise from human enslavement. It is a reparation through storytelling that Uncle Julius delivers to his listeners.