The New Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Abstract

The present research study has been conducted on two novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and God Help the Child (2015) written by Toni Morrison to examine the black’s artistic practices, performances and representations in the American society. Textual analysis has been employed as a research method to interpret the primary texts with the help of extra-textual knowledge in order to locate the historical configuration of black aesthetics, black identities in the U.S, black culture, African-American motherhood, personality traits and Creolization. The selected texts are contextualized into P. C. Taylor’s Black is Beautiful and Morrison’s The Origin of Others but this study goes beyond the ideas propounded by these theorists. These secondary resources merely give the impression that ‘black is beautiful’ and they have their own culture, traditions and heritage to make them a powerful nation. However, this study reveals multiple perspectives in which blacks represent their authenticity in terms of physique, culture, traditions and politics. The term ‘black aesthetics’ is concerned with African-American’ ‘ways of doing and perceiving things’. The findings of this research project significantly steers that new black is all about building new practices and life-worlds out of Old World Order to reclaim their heritage.