Cultural Oppression and Loss of Identity Agency, Alterity and Ambivalence in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: Post-Colonial and Feminist Perspectives

This study examines Toni Morison' The Bluest Eye and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart from Post-Colonial and Feminist Perspectives. Morrison and Achebe's characters are examples of how the oppressed tinker with the well-grounded common cultural standards and norms and the newly imposed by the colonizer. This study focuses on how cultural oppression leads to identity loss in light of postcolonialism and feminism. The study utilizes Simone de Beauvoir's Theory as elaborated in her The Second Sex, and Edward Said's Orientalism. It also functions post-colonial terminology (agency, alterity and ambivalence) to best understand the influence that cultural oppression has got on the two protagonists. It is revealed that cultural and social discourses play vital roles in constructing the identity of the subject. The construction of the subject (Self-West- the White) is inseparable from the construction of the object (other, Orient, and the black). Cultural oppression has got a hegemonic control over the victimized. Reactions towards the hegemonic cultural control vary from agency, to alterity and to ambivalence. The victimized lose their true identity and in several case their lives as a result. It is hypothesized that the two novelists deploy their styles artistically and critically to draw attention to the milieu of the oppressed under the yoke of hegemonic control of the oppressor. They also endeavor to engage the reader in putting forward a plan for emancipation and salvation.