The central issue around which many of our discussions have pivoted is the conflicted application of racial identity, as Cheng notes: the fundamental paradox “at the heart of minority discourse” is that identity allows for both progress and discrimination (24).
The Bluest Eye, in presenting the fantasy of becoming “white” by changing the bodily signs of blackness, is engaging in an extension of the skin creams, powders, and hair-straighteners it features so often in relation to its characters. The semi-mystical alteration of something so present and yet physically inaccessible is the ultimate symbolic representation of changing identity or identification. In its link with the gaze as the object that allows sight, the eye is at once connected with both seeing and being seen: to see the world through blue eyes is “different” than seeing it through brown eyes, and this symbolic difference can be understood socially as a product of the different identities created by and created for people with different physical characteristics. Recognition of self and other—seeing the world—is a product of social identity, of being seen and understood through physical characteristics.
That “the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment” can be understood as the product of the paradox of identity (Morrison 204). Identity is a source of power as well as of discrimination, and a blue-eyed black girl, who conforms to no one’s identity, becomes a pariah. This bears on the dangers of an ethnobiological “passing” that goes far beyond “Sarah Jane,” and is slowly becoming a reality in the age of genomics.
No comments:
Post a Comment