Homeplace as the Site of Contestation: 
Self, Community, and Sense of Place in The Bluest Eye and Sul

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Title:	Homeplace as the Site of Contestation: Self, Community, and Sense of Place in The Bluest Eye and Sul
Authors:	游錫熙;Yu, Joseph
Contributors:	淡江大學英文學系
Keywords:	Toni Morrison;The Bluest Eye;Sula;Sense of place
Date:	2004-12-17
Issue Date:	2011-09-12 10:10:53 (UTC+8)
Publisher:	中央研究院歐美研究所
Abstract:	Creating a sense of place has been imperative for many fiction writers. Descriptions of a place often constitute a major part of a writer’s creation of setting. In recent years, however, place has come to mean more than just a locale or backdrop of a fictional work. The significance of place and its relations with identity formation have been extensively documented and discussed. Some critics may argue that “the presumed certainties of cultural identity, firmly located in particular places which housed stable cohesive communities of shared tradition and perspective, though never a reality for some, were increasingly disrupted and displaced for all” (Carter, Donald, and Squires vii). However, for ethnic writers seeking political intervention in a dominant society, place still figures prominently. Place for them is the locus of community, the locus of collective memory. As such, it is the repository of traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation as well as the site to put up resistance to and struggle against dominant values: “Place thus potentially becomes part of a ‘politics of resistance, [seeking] to reinscribe a place-based territorial identity in opposition to the spatial colonizations of capitalist modernity’”. Creating such a sense of place has been Toni Morrison’s forte. In one novel after another, she has been able to envision a community, or a neighborhood, as she prefers to call it, and then flesh it out with palpable, convincing physicalities and atmospherics. In this paper I seek to investigate Morrison’s sense of place in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1974) and its implications for the individual and the community.
Relation:	童妮．摩里森學術研討會
Appears in Collections:	[Graduate Institute & Department of English] Proceeding

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Sense_of_Place.pdf	Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, sense of place	117Kb	Adobe PDF	1	View/Open

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