Blackness as a dialogical construct in Toni Morrison's fiction

Abstract

Identity can be defined in terms of an ideological relationship with others, especially “significant others”, that generally mirror back an image of the self in question within a social context. The human mind is not monological; therefore, we define identity in a dialogue with or a struggle against others. This paper presents how the identity of black female children in Toni Morrison’s <i>The bluest eye</i> (1994) is dialogically built up within a context that is American, canonical and whose literary supremacy is eminently white.