Annotated Bibliography

1. “Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory).” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, by Cathy Caruth, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 91–112.

Caruth explores Lacan’s interruption of Freud’s theory on trauma suggesting that there is a correlation in surviving a traumatic event and building one’s identity and reality around the event. This chapter is useful in analyzing how survivors or victims shape their lives around traumatic events.

2. Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/44029500.

Balaev addresses the concept of trauma as one traditionally associated with memory, experience and language but also adds geographical place to the mix. The formation of identity post traumatic event is linked to the geographical place because of its specific social values. Citing Caruth, Balaev also argues the contagious nature of trauma (intergenerational trauma) on individuals and groups of people.

3. Brooks Bouson , J. “Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.’” Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame and Writing, by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Anne Clark, State University of New York Press, 1999, pp. 207–236.

As the title suggests, Bouson explores shame and self-loathing in The Bluest Eye that stems from societal expectations and norms of beauty in a white dominated nation. This “shame” is culturally learned and continually perpetuated throughout generations becoming a part of black identity in the United States. This article is useful in explaining the historical and cultural significance of the Breedloves believing they are ugly as well as the black community deeming them ugly. The article sheds light on racially traumatized groups of individuals and the silence that often accompanies this trauma.

4. Ramírez, M. L. (2013). “The Theme of the Shattered Self in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye And A Mercy”.Miscelánea, 48, 75-91. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/docview/1497043922?accountid=27495

Ramirez analyzes the character of Pecola in the Bluest Eye and argues that she forms her traumatized disassociated identity from a marginalized position that can be attributed to western patriarchal society. Ramirez also makes the connection between a marginalized group of people and the abuse that community inflicts to its own members forming a chain of abuse.

5. Vickroy, L. (1996). “The politics of abuse: The traumatized child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras”.Mosaic, 29(2), 91. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1300043843?accountid=27495

Vickroy explores how colonization affected the mindset of people who were subjects of a white ruling class and how it continues to do so. She also analyzes how social powerlessness plays a role in the abuse of children by adults, in particular powerless men. This essay shows how the internalization of dominate beliefs and values create powerless individuals who in turn express their frustration and anger on the most vulnerable members.

Research Question:

What psychological theories are present in The Bluest Eye that help examine and explain the behaviors of some of the characters? What theorists can be used to explain the dynamics that affect and shape the characters’ lives and moral conduct?

Theory – Trauma theory

Characters – Pecola and Cholly

Bibliography

“Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory).” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, by Cathy Caruth, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 91–112.

Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029500.

Brooks Bouson , J. “Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.’” Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame and Writing, by Joseph Adamson and Hilary Anne Clark, State University of New York Press, 1999, pp. 207–236.

Ramírez, M. L. (2013). “The Theme of the Shattered Self in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye And A Mercy”. Miscelánea, 48, 75-91. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/docview/1497043922?accountid=27495

Vickroy, L. (1996). “The politics of abuse: The traumatized child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras”. Mosaic, 29(2), 91. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1300043843?accountid=27495

Research question:

What psychological theories are present in The Bluest Eye that help examine and explain the behaviors of some of the characters? What theorists can be used to explain the dynamics that affect and shape the characters’ lives and moral conduct?

Possible characters:

• Pecola
• Cholly
• Pauline

Possible theories:

• Psychoanalytic theory
• Trauma theory
• Moral development

Sandra Batres

Blog #6

Black Anger and Black Bodies

            Claudia Rankine’s second section of her book Citizen: An American Lyric explores anger and how it has been a demoralizing trope of Black Americans. This section explores a concept Rankine addresses in the first section, the duality between the “historical self” and the “self self”. Not only does the “historical-self” carry the history of a person’s family and race— segregation, slavery and oppression but the “historical self” also understands depictions of bodies—racist representations that become burdens, often stifling the “self self” from being authentic in public, authentic to the degree that others can openly be. In fear of becoming a racially charged caricature, the “self self” is kept hidden. Any display exemplifying anger, even if toward an obvious injustice will become an element of scrutiny, opening an acceptable racial window from which to view and judge their bodies as well as their personalities. When considering American sports, there is something to be said about the scrutiny of black bodies and their expectation on the field, on the court and before the eyes of their American audience.

Interestingly, Rankine starts the second section of her book with a famous black male YouTuber who advises the use of anger to one’s own advantage. Although Rankine seems to understand the idea of profiting from a “marketable black anger,” she criticizes the notion stating that this type of anger as an act in exposing expectations of blackness doesn’t speak of the anger that occurs through daily experience. Furthermore, it might not accomplish much, I would argue that it reinforces the stereotype, selling a caricature of one’s own race undermines real and justified anger. For example a display of anger doesn’t work in American sports, a fact especially true for black athletes. Being the “angry black man” or “angry black woman” outside of a Tyler Perry movie is unacceptable especially while participating in something as sacred and tied to national identity, unity and patriotism as is American sports. The idea of Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful yet angry resistance toward systematic injustice, racism and oppression took the form of kneeling while the national anthem played—a politicizing of sports that didn’t sit well with the NFL and white sports fans. Why such a protest in a game that is supposed to unite Americans? Why did he have to ruin it for everyone and make it about race? This display angered white America because an athlete dared to be angry, dared to protest, dared to take a stand (by taking a knee) to racial injustice. In that moment he ceased to be a black body crashing into other bodies in a field. His world didn’t revolve around the entertainment of Americans but was highly conscious of an obligation to the “historical self” as well as the “self self”. This sudden and unwarranted visibility of blackness, his call of injustice and discrimination was far too much for white sports fans to handle – “where the discrimination?” they asked, as they turned their back, turned off screens and boycotted the team until that angry un-American black man is removed from the field. Despite what Hennessy Youngman advises about anger, Kaepernick had everything to lose with the outrage he caused. Regardless of the support he received from black people, liberals and other politically conscious people, the NFL is still conservatively white owned and run – a metaphor for the greater American power dynamics.

The focus of the second section of Rankine’s book is on what people want to see and what they don’t want to see from black bodies. Serena Williams for example, on the same boat as Kaepernick but at the mercy of a different hatred, is an example of a black body considered too powerful for the sport of tennis. Her body and expressions of frustration open to public scrutiny and ridicule. Through her example of Serena Williams’ display of anger, hers more obvious and “aggressive,” Rankine shows the repercussions of such anger from a body that has never been accepted. While Kaepernick’s body is in essence told to “shut up and play,” Serena’s body is mocked and hated because of its power. Black bodies in sports are highly visible when it comes to what they represent, Kaepernick through football is profitable if you have a stake in the game and Williams is threatening in an elite white sport. Their voices and expressions of frustration are what people don’t want to see or hear. When they step outside of the realm of what is expected of them in terms of sportsmanship and what is considered patriotic, the judges can freely take out their stereotypical lens and label them as the typical aggressive black bodies making a “thing” out of nothing.

Sandra Batres

BLOG #5

Toni Morrison’s Broken Men

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is undoubtedly known for its perspective of the black female childhood conceptualization of the world and its unyielding racism and sexism. Though the focus of the novel is certainly the lives and bodies of young black females, there is something to be said about the comparison of these females to the portrayal of men in the novel. Males such as Geraldine’s son, Junior, Cholly and his son Sammy, form an array of dysfunctional men. The novel presents the struggle of black females as one tied to the standard conceptions of beauty. Females, in the novel have internalized hatred for themselves and in turn, like Geraldine, hatred against those darker than them. On the other hand, the male representation or lack thereof in the novel is most certainly not an oversight but a portrait of the effects institutional racism has on the black male’s sense of freedom and the feelings of confinement that follow them throughout life. Males are represented through their absence, the act of running away, and through their presence, in the form of destructive or sexually destructive acts. Thus, women and men in the novel both express their frustrations of ideological and institutional holds on them in damaging ways. The scene with the smashing of the watermelon comes to symbolize the male’s internalized anger for his lack of freedom as well as his aggression towards the women in his life. In the same vein, Claudia’s violent deconstruction of her dolls not only to disfigure but to find the essence is parallel to the 4^th of July picnic crushing of the watermelon.

The difference between these two parallels, however, is that one is more organized, taking a scientific hatred of sorts. Claudia, performs anger induced autopsies on her dolls—attempting to find something close to a heart, a spirit that justifies its living presence in her mind, “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me” (20). However, her method has a sort of violence, a violence against the living something that separates her from the Maureen Peal’s of the world, “If I pinched them, their eyes—unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll’s eyes—would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge” (23). At a young age Claudia becomes aware of the standards that mold her self-loathing, her dissection is a method to find freedom from this white doll’s beauty—if she could only understand its appeal, she can be free from it.

On the other hand, Cholly is a man that craves freedom, he needs it to survive. He resents Pauline for the anchor that she becomes. The fact that Cholly, throughout his life has chosen to run away is perhaps a criticism from Morrison on a man’s need to be free, unrestrained from any institution, including the institution of marriage at the cost of female sacrifice. Women as a consequence are left to take care of the problems—to birth and bury their children alone, to hate and take care of their “broken” daughters alone. Cholly’s freedom as well as his hatred are symbolized in the crushing of the watermelon, representing a man’s freedom to be primal, reckless, unattached and have the freedom to destroy something and eat its heart because he can. Claudia wants to find the heart of the doll, she doesn’t want to “eat it” but rather understand it and perhaps find some sort of inner resolution from her findings. Contrary to this, Cholly doesn’t want to understand anything, he wants to “taste” this freedom, similar to Pecola “drinking” Shirley Temple. However, Pecola is bound to ideology, in reality she can never be Shirley Temple and Cholly is free to run away if he chooses. Similar to Claudia, the father at the 4^th of July picnic dismembers the watermelon, though does so forcefully. The image makes Cholly think of the devil,

The father of the family lifted the melon high over his head—his big arms looked taller than the trees to Cholly, and the melon blotted out the sun. […] He wondered if God looked like that. No. God was a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes that looked sad when people died and mean when they were bad. It must be the devil who looks like that—holding the world in his hands, ready to dash it to the ground and spill the red guts […] And now the strong, black devil was blotting out the sun and getting ready to split open the world (134).

Cholly’s freedom, through the dismemberment of the watermelon is thus associated with the devil, sin and destruction. Blue sharing the heart of the ruptured watermelon instills in Cholly the act of freedom and independence (it’s the 4^th of July after all) through an aggressive, bloody and forceful manner.

Males such as Geraldine’s son Junior, Cholly and his son Sammy express their frustrations and exert a sense of freedom through violent acts. Junior abuses the cat, Cholly abuses his family and Sammy inflicts his own sort of damage, “Sammy used his [ugliness] as a weapon to cause others pain. He adjusted his behavior to it, chose his companions on the basis of it: people who could be fascinated, even intimidated by it” (39). Sammy eventually runs away for good, his sex a freedom or privilege of sorts.  At an early age, Sammy and Junior learn of the aggression that is coupled with a confused sense of freedom and release. In her novel, Morrison presents the criticism of males deserting females as well as those staying and destroying the lives of their children. Although she presents male stories, she understand the limitations she has in getting to the heart of the male’s position. By stating that Cholly’s life can only be pieced together and understood by a musician, Morrison is stating that she is only an author, and that his dangerous freedom can only be understood by those who compose and arrange pieces of music connected to the heart of the human complexity that is paradoxical— but more than that, she is only a woman, unable to truly get at the core of the male’s perspective.