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ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to address how Toni Morri.ron's first novel, The Bluest Eye, points to different experiences of geographical scales and space that simultaneously complicate and reiterate the meaning of being black. Places, bodies and minds, as they intertwine, fluctuate, and ostensibly stay the same, play off each other in complicated ways in Morrison's novel. Drawing on anti-racist theory and from anti-racist and feminist geographies, this article examines Morrison's novel and characters in order to bring forth the links between the interrelated categories of race, racism, gender and place. It illustrates how material realities, corporeal differences and subjective understandings of place, race and racism are mutually constructed. IL addresses how the meaning of being black in a white-dominated society, in The Bluest Eye at least, is illustrative of complex subjectivities that are situated in places, communities and nations that deny comfortable and coherent lined experiences.
Prologue and Setting
In that young and growing Ohio town whose side streets, even, were paved with concrete, which sat on the edge of a clam blue lake, which boasted an affinity with Oberlin, the underground railroad station, just thirteen miles away, this melting pot on the lip of America facing the cold but receptive CanadaWhat could go wrong? [2]
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye charts the lives of Pecola Breedlove, her parents, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove, and Claudia MacTeer. The story is set in Lorain, Ohio, a segregated steel industry town, in the early 1940s [3]. This context is significant in that it marks a time when Southern black women and men were migrating to the Northern USA in search of work and formal emancipation [4]. While this migration north incited and reflected the establishment of new black middle- and working-class populations, it also denoted a particularly complicated time in black American history. During the early to mid-twentieth century, the movement of black populations to major northern urban centres, such as those in Ohio, was coupled with intense urbanisation and industrialisation; this urban growth opened up possible employment opportunities and better living conditions (Kusmer, 1976; Peaceful, 1996; Knepper, 1997). However, this development was extremely uneven, and the black population remained, for the most part, situated in lower income jobs and housing (Kusmer, 1976; James,...