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"The Bluest Eye" Criticism: Keywords and Links

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The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity
Author: Jane Kuenz
Source: African American Review , Autumn, 1993, Vol. 27, No. 3, Women's Culture Issue (Autumn, 1993), pp. 421-431
Published by: Indiana State University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3041932

Keywords: Mass culture, Hollywood, Sexualization, Race/Gender, Commodification, Commodity Culture, Postmodernity, Capitalism

Main claim: "The Bluest Eye as a whole documents this invasion-and its concomitant erasure of specific local bodies, histories, and cultural productions-in terms of sexuality as it intersects with commodity culture. Furthermore, this mass culture and, more generally, the commodity capitalism that gave rise to it, is in large part responsible-through its capacity to efface history-for the "disinterestedness" that Morrison condemns throughout the novel. Beyond exemplifying this, Morrison's project is to rewrite the specific bodies and histories of the black Americans whose positive images and stories have been eradicated by commodity culture."

Key citations in Works Cited: 

Awkward, Michael. Inspirting Inifuences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. Now York: Columbia UP, 1989.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Uterary Tradition." Wall 16-37. Jameson, Fredric. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text 1 (1979): 135-48.
Smith, Valerie. "Black Feminist Theory and Other Representations of the Other." Wall 38-57.
Wall, Cheryl  A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. Wallace, Michele. "Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity." Reading Black, Reading Feninist A CriticalAnthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 5247.
Willis, Susan. "I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?" Wall 173-95.