Give the understanding of COLONIZER V/S COLONIZED through Toni Morrison "The Bluest Eye"

Name: Gayatri Nimavat & Riddhi Solanki 

Roll No: 36 & 47

Class: T.Y B.A (English) Batch: 2017-2018

College: R.M.D Mahila Arts and Commerce College.

Ø INTRODUCTION

     ‘The bluest eye’ by Toni Morrison is the story of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who lives in a society which doesn’t offer any reflection of her beauty and subjectivity. This study tries to examine this novel based on theories of post-structuralist critic, Homi. K. Bhabha. In his work Bhabha challenges the notions of fixed identities, undermine the binary opposition between colonized and colonizer, and emphasizes the role of discourse and language in identity formation of both the colonizer and the colonized.

Ø Colonizer v/s colonized

       Colonizer believed in spreading their education and religion because of the belief that it was superior and also from their idea that the English way of life was the best and only way of life. All other forms were regarded and unholy and less advanced.

   

        The natives were very different from the English and their way of life was completely different, because for the first time they had only just come into contact with people outside of the Americas, and so there was no relation between the cultures at all. Unlike in Africa and Asia where trade had been established for years and connection had been made for centuries before colonization took place.

         Colonization often results in poor power relation between the colonizer and the colonized, which is likely to lead into negative stereotypes against the colonized. This in turn affects the colonized identity construction. The article discusses about the colonial construction of beauty to analyze to novel written by Toni Morrison, ‘The Bluest Eye’ [1970]. Moreover, here also supports the analysis of three important concepts of colonial problems, including constructed   concept of beauty by colonizer, power of dominance and also concept of inequality, in order to address the incapability of both main characters in constructing their beauty concept.

      

        The colonizer wants to get the blacks internalize themselves as ugly and cannot be equally compared to the whites. The conclusion of the analysis shows that both main characters cannot successfully construct and resist their own beauty concept which they hold for a quite long time; however, they are successful to be different from their ex-colonizer. This is because no one could be identically the ‘Same’ both physically and psychologically because the nature of adopting the white ethic will be never very far from mockery.

        

      Frantz Fanon states that the aim of colonization is not only to take almost all control of the colonized people’s life, but also to try to blank colonized people’s mind from all ‘From and content’. Which at last keeps the colonized people down ‘Disfigure’, and ‘Destroys’ them. By destroying the history and culture of the colonized people, the white colonizers has successfully made a new set of values for these colonized. Ashcroft claims that colonial discourse tends to exclude the exploitation of the colonized and define the colonized society as ‘Barbaric’ or ‘Uncivilized’ which justifies the colonizer intervention to improve it.

         Toni Morrison was one of the Afro-American writers who dared to speak out and challenged the white dominant cultures and the domination of these cultures. In this article, I choose to analyze novel ‘THE BLUEST EYE’ to show the position of the ex-colonized and their relation to the ex-colonizer. This novel is Toni Morrison’s first novel and written when she taught in Harvard university.

          The white colonialist strategy is to get the colonized black to undergo a process of epistemic violence, a process whereby the colonizer’s myths, to begin to see her identity through the paradigm of white supremacy.

Ø IN SUM UP

          The exploration of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in a post-colonial frame work was the main concern of this study. In this study it is attempted to deconstruct the binary opposition between the colonized and the colonizer based on theories of uncanny, stereotype and mimicry proposed by Homi.k.Bhabha. First, the concept of stereotype is discussed to clarify the anxious relationship between the colonized and the colonizer and how the scope drives play a significant role is forming stereotype. Second, the idea of mimicry or sly civility was applied to ‘The Bluest Eye’ to represent the colonized mockery of the colonizer’s dominance and at last,  or uncanny elements of novel were enumerated. The whole study tries to show the unhomely nature of the colonial world and its effects on both colonized and colonizer study shows that the simple polarization of the self and other is impossible and underneath this opposition there is a complex mutual relationship.