Gillan, Jennifer. “Focusing on the wrong front: historical displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 2, 2002, p. 283+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A89872243/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=82c9b322. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.

Hovet, Grace Ann, and Barbara Lounsberry. “Flying as Symbol and Legend in Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,’ ‘Sula,’ and ‘Song of Solomon.’” CLA Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 1983, pp. 119–140. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44321768. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.

McWeeny, Jennifer. “Topographies of Flesh: Women, Nonhuman Animals, and the Embodiment of Connection and Difference.” Hypatia, vol. 29, no. 2, 2014, pp. 269–286. www.jstor.org/stable/24542034. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.

Vasquez, Sam. “In Her Own Image: Literary and Visual Representations of Girlhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, p. 58+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A365688777/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=d1f1dab9. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.

Wong, Shelley. “Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye.” Callaloo, vol. 13, no. 3, 1990, pp. 471–481 .JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2931331. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.

In beginning my research for this project, I knew I would mainly be relying on the resources provided by databases accessed through the Hunter Library. However, I also planned to utilize the New York Public Library databases, as demonstrated to me by a NYPL staff member during a trip with my translation theory class last year, which I’ve come to see as invaluable, especially for more niche research topics. In searching through these two portals, I realized that my main citations would come from JSTOR and Academic Search Premiere. Combining my search terms of “Toni Morrison” and/or “The Bluest Eye” with “animal,” “nature,” and “bird” produced an acceptable amount of success, supplying a fair number of articles that I could choose from, but honestly not as many as I hoped for. Between the two portals, I think I browsed every peer-reviewed journal related to animal imagery in the novel, and was surprised with how few examine the book in this context, especially in comparison to some other critical lenses. This may not be a bad thing!

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

Conner, Marc Cameron. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002.

FORD, TANISHA C. LIBERATED THREADS: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA PR, 2017.

“HARLEM’S ‘NATURAL SOUL’: Selling Black Beauty to the Diaspora in the Early 1960s.” Style & Status Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975, by Susannah Walker, The University Press of Kentucky, 2007, pp. 41–66.

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.

For Thursday’s asynchronous session this week, you will explore the various “situations” found in section VI of Rankine’s text. Choose one of the videos produced by Rankine and John Lucas, which you can find on Rankine’s site, and view it alongside the corresponding moment in Rankine’s text. In 500-800 words, posted to our blog, respond to the “situation.” You might consider:

• why is it called a “situation”? How does this text “situate” the speaker and the subjects it deals with? What are other valences of the word “situation” that might come into play?
• how does the text interact with the moving images? how does it “read” differently when viewing it as a film rather than reading it in a book. What does it mean that Rankine has supplemented her printed text in this way?
• what are the major themes in this “situation” and how does it relate to the rest of Rankine’s text?

The wonderful Distinguished Writers Series at Hunter is hosting Claudia Rankine this Thursday at 6:30. She’s talking about her new book, Just Us, which is fantastic and completes a trilogy along with Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen.

Please check it out. Info on how to register here:

https://hunter.cuny.edu/event/distinguished-writers-series-claudia-rankine/

Anyone who attends and posts at least a paragraph on their impressions will get either:

–amnesty from one missing blog post

–5 points boost on their midterm

Cheers!

Morrison, T. (2007). The bluest eye: A novel. New York: Vintage International.

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 15 Nov. 2020.

Vasquez, Sam. “In Her Own Image: Literary and Visual Representations of Girlhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, p. 58+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A365688777/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=d1f1dab9. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” College Literature, vol. 37 no. 2, 2010, p. 147-170. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lit.0.0108.

Wall, Cheryl A. “On Dolls, Presidents, and Little Black Girls.” Signs, vol. 35, no. 4, 2010, pp. 796–801. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/651034. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Hyman, Ramona L. “PECOLA BREEDLOVE: THE SACRIFICIAL ICONOCLAST IN ‘THE BLUEST EYE.’” CLA Journal, vol. 52, no. 3, 2009, pp. 256–264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325476. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Bergner, Gwen. “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem.” American Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 299–332. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27734991. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Stewart, Jacqueline. “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 650–677. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/377724. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

I used mostly Hunter Libraries OneSearch and JSTOR to find these articles. I searched through multiple databases JSTOR was the one that was really giving me a lot of results for the terms that I was searching for. I specifically searched for articles that had the terms “the bluest eye” and “the imitation of life” together so I could find more people that talk about that reference that is mentioned in Werrlein’s article. I also replaced that reference to other pop culture references in bluest eye like “Shirley Temple” and for more broader articles I simply replaced those specific terms with “children”, “media”, “racism”, and “imagery” (all of these going along with “the bluest eye”). In my research I found many people talk about “the clark doll study” so I also independently searched that with “representation” and tried to find more articles that linked this to the Bluest Eye. I think in the end I chose the articles I thought fit the most with my research topic of the effect of white narratives and representation in media on black children and how that message is portrayed in The Bluest Eye.