Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”

The construction of African-American women’s identity politics in the 1940s

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye describes the destructive effects and the dramatic consequences of the white standards of beauty in the US of the 1940s. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate from a Race, Ethnicity, Imperialism feminist perspective how the novel contributes to forging identity politics among African-American women in the first half of the twentieth century and its significance in contemporary society.