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The ways in which Black boys and men are framed and projected within U.S. society reveal clear messages of Black misandry, Negrophobia, and scripting of Black male bodies. From “tar baby” to “thug”...

Morrison’s fascination with building novels around a folktale continued as she wrote her fourth book, Tar Baby, published in 1981. Many of her comments about the folktale appeared separate from the novel, however. She described a kind of fear she felt when the concept of that “baby” — a girl child — made from sticky tar by a white man was used to lure, and catch, the necessarily black Br’er Rabbit character. The tale became a narrative of men pitted against each other, the black man less powerful, in the attempts to capture the desirable, but false, “baby.” As she explained

In this paper, I am going to conduct a feminist reading of Tar Baby by using feminist theory. We are going to look at the issues of gender identity according to feminist’s ideologies and principles in term of oppression against black in general and black women specifically. In addition to that, we are going to use one of the main principles of feminism, which is the patriarchy system between gender and origin. This analysis based on the actions, thoughts and behaviors of the major characters in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby to gain their identity, also to understand the nature of gender inequality and examining women's social roles, experience and interests

This paper aims to deconstruct Toni Morrison’s selected novels through the lenses of ecocriticism. It looks at her work from an ecocritical angle. Sula has traditionally been read as a story about female friendship ;Song of Solomon has been critically acclaimed for its vivid capture of African American cultural heritage ; Tar Baby is regarded as a masterpiece because of its high folkloric resonance ; Beloved is perceived as a survey of the horrors of slavery ; Paradise is regarded as the narrative of contemporary communities confronted with great social changes, while A Mercy is considered to be a story of black women slaves’ struggles to gain freedom in America in the 1600s. Historically, critics have attempted to perceive Morrison’s fiction from the socio-historical lens that has little to do with Nature. However, Nature serves as a background to Morrison's work. It not only serves as imagery but more of a living being that reacts to human exploitation. Morrison's selected novels highlight diverse aspects of this human versus nature relationship that deserves an in-depth analysis. In fact, these novels provide ample evidence that the author sees ecosensitivity and ecological consciousness as possible ways to curb environmental degradation. This paper posits the nonhuman world encoded in Morrison’s novels. It maintains that Morrison’s fiction could raise awareness about ecological wisdom which is key to understanding and solving the current environmental challenges.

This essay argues that Essence magazine provides a crucial intertext for understanding Toni Morrison’s engagement in Tar Baby with the political debates that surrounded the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan in the black power era and her use of the Tar Baby story to dramatize and interpret those debates. Tar Baby responds to early scandals at the magazine spurred by white capitalist investment in the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan as well as the magazine’s coverage of a splintering black liberation movement, its Caribbean travel features, and its shifting assessments of affirmative action, white feminism, and domestic violence. Throughout, the novel uses the Tar Baby story to link the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan not with an emancipatory politics but instead with New World histories that have constituted racial blackness in and through division and that position black women to become scapegoats for the failure to achieve racial unity in the face of white domination.

In this article, I discuss Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel, Tar Baby, through the lens of a trickster tale on which the novel is loosely based. Tar Baby invites one to choose sides between Jadine, the African American female protagonist with a European education and worldviews, or Son, the bearer of a more traditional African American cultural heritage and values. Son is initially constructed as other, and his representation is based on negative stereotypical notions of the African American male. First impressions need to be revised later, as the text plays with the readers’ sympathies about Son. Even his survival is left open at the end of the novel and the range of options of how to categorize Son would seem to reflect the readers’ perceptions back on themselves. In this way, Morrison sets up a trap in which any reader making too easy or essentialist definitions of the character will fall. Thus, the most important expression of the trickster tale is the novel’s name: the novel itself is the tar baby. Moreover, the most important construction of tar lies in the ambiguous representation of Son.

Reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Paradise and A Mercy through the lens of Bakhtin reveals identity construction as a dialogic endeavour. While this method may be necessary for character development, it serves the further purpose of making an ethical case for the self’s responsibility to others. This paper considers key theoretical instruments, as enabled by Bakhtin, in relation to Morrison’s treatment of naming and other character constructing elements. It is ultimately Morrison’s construction of identity as dialogical which enables the argument that Morrison’s fiction offers an ethics in the interest of the other. Writing about the marginalised, the abused and the voiceless reveals Morrison’s oeuvre is unmistakably an ongoing engagement with the injustice of slavery and its political, economic, social and psychological aftermath. The relevance of this article lies in its analysis of Morrison’s fiction as an antidote which challenges the self’s “self-interest”, which is at the heart of injustice. This study’s primary contribution is in articulating Morrison’s portrayal of the self’s identity construction as an inescapable dialogism that forms the foundation to a philosophy that promotes greater humaneness, given the other is not separate from the self, but in fact, integral to the self.

There are many difficulties for African Americans to define their identity. Culture is the main factor that puzzles them. This paper focuses on the cultural perspective to analyze the identity perplexity of African Americans. Living in the crevice of different cultures, in order to survive they should reshape their cultural identity to unify the black culture and white culture in one body. In Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby, two protagonists Jadine and Son’s opposite cultural views not only result in the failure of their love affair, but also cause their identity crisis. Actually, under the powerful impact of the mainstream discourse, many African Americans have lost themselves. In order to reconstruct their identity, African Americans should deconstruct the hegemony of dominant discourse and rebuild their confidence in their traditional culture.

What do you do when you come to know that you're stuck to the intractable stuff of other folks' and other times' making, stuck more deeply the more you rail against it for not answering to your hailing? What do you do when you're busted to pieces and can't pull it all together with the hum of a song? What do you do when you find yourself outside a structure that won't let you (or your loves) inside its towered walls and gated communities? What follow are prescriptions divined from fabulous tales of tar babies, terrapins, and supersized machine-horses. Southern myth-science. To borrow from others in this collection: hum/animal songs from outer space(s).

The previous chapter closed with the assertion that the unifying feature in the experiences of Macon Dead, Joe Trace, and Son Green was that each grew up having to contend with dead or absent mothers. I discussed Joe Trace’s effort to retaliate against what he comes to believe is his mother’s malicious act of abandonment. Scanning Tar Baby , we find only a scant reference to Son’s mother; for him home is the space occupied by “Old Man,” his father, who otherwise lives alone.

ion from his material environment. The foods that baffle Margaret in this passage are the tropical fruits of the island and are thus aligned with the island’s flora and fauna closed out by Valerian’s greenhouse isolation. Eating is arguably the activity that puts us most intimately and elementally in touch with the concrete material world, as we take in and transmute into our own substance the fruits of nature. Eating is what Margaret cannot do. By the end of the breakfast, some ten pages later, she has managed to consume only one bite. In Tar Baby, the grotesque is thus associated most strongly with the abstraction of the capitalist characters. Their bizarre habits—Valerian’s self-incarceration in the greenhouse, Margaret’s inability to eat, and, I would add, Jadine’s insistence on wearing a fur coat in the heat of the tropics—enact maladjustment to the basic material conditions of life, expressing the depth of their alienation. From Colonial to Capitalist Exploitation Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein tells us, “is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital”; as a result of “its [own] internal logic,” a capitalist system “expand[s] its boundaries” (xiv). Morrison’s critique encompasses this expansionary drive, in particular the historical reach of capitalism into the Caribbean through the entwined trades of sugar and slavery; historical allusions to the European colonization of the islands cluster around the characters’ doings in the present, suggesting a continuity of exploitation from the colonial past to the capitalist present. Carruth’s astute essay on the geopolitics of food expresses this continuity in economic terms: Tar Baby, she says, mirrors the change “from a colonial to late capitalist economy—an economy in which an American-led paradigm of free trade carries on the imperial trade in cocoa, sugarcane, and other Caribbean commodities” (606). The candy millionaire Valerian represents the contemporary permutation of this trade in sugar and cocoa, as well as the expansionary reach of capital into the Caribbean. In a scene that exemplifies Morrison’s technique of superimposing shapes drawn from history onto the figures of her characters, Valerian and Son confront each other after their Christmas dinner dispute. Each finds support for his standpoint in the legendary horsemen who ride the island’s hills, ex-slaves who, as both the native islanders (8) and the omniscient narrator (152) tell us, swam ashore along with some horses when a slave ship foundered off the Isle des Chevaliers some three hundred years ago: Somewhere in the back of Valerian’s mind one hundred French chevaliers were roaming the hills on horses. Their swords were in their scabbards and their epaulets glittered in the sun. Backs straight, shoulders high—alert but restful in the security of the Napoleonic Code. W y a t t

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "MADAME, COULD I INTEREST YOU IN A PAIR OF WHITE KIDS?" A popular caricature postcard from the i9zos shows an African American woman shopping with her three young children. A white saleswoman holds out a pair of white gloves to her and asks, "Madame could I interest you in a pair of white kids?" The double entendre, white kid-leather gloves and white children, reflects the ubiquitous image and reality of African American women taking care of white children in American culture. The word "mammy" doesn't even have to appear on the postcard for the image to be evoked through the size, shape, and color of the African American woman. Similar depictions of black motherhood tied to white childcare were popular and contentious well before the phenomenal success of Kathryn Stockett's bestselling novel The Help, and the subsequent award-winning film. The Help opens with a chapter named for and supposedly written in the voice of the African American domestic worker Aibileen Clark, and devotes the first seven paragraphs to the white child Mae Mobley, whom she is hired to babysit. Here is the reader's very first glimpse into Aibileen's inner life: "Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that's what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime" (1). Aibileen doesn't mention her own son Treelore until later, and it is his absence that makes Aibileen more available to her employers' children. Aibileen doesn't reflect on the day of Treelore's birth but instead introduces him in terms of his death and ties it directly to her employment for white families: "I lost my own son, Treelore, right before I started waiting on Miss Leefolt. He was twenty-four years old. The best part of a person's life" (2). Not one of Aibileen's eleven chapters are devoted to any substantial memory of her twenty-four years with Treelore; we learn only that he liked to read, wore big glasses, and wanted to write. She tells us that she was proud of her son and then describes his death. In two paragraphs, she introduces her son and takes him away. By contrast, Mae Mobley is described using very specific details, including her last name, and the week, month, and general time of her birth. Taking care of white babies is more than what Aibileen "does"; it is her primary identity as one of the main characters. By emphasizing Aibileen's relationship to Mae Mobley and "her" other seventeen white children, her own son is effectively erased and Aibileen is established as a black mother who belongs to white children--the cornerstone of the complex and long standing Black Mammy stereotype. (1) In my book Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory, I make a case for what I call a literary "Mammy Trap" in my reading of authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Faulkner. Despite their best intentions to introduce more complex African American characters into their work, the stereotypical Black Mammy seeps into their fiction as part of the vocabulary of plantation fiction. One of the most consistent traits assigned to the stereotypic mammy character is that, over her own children, she demonstrates a strong preference for the white children of the families who own or employ her. For example, in both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Sound and the Fury, the characters Aunt Chloe and Dilsey (respectively) dismiss and punish their own children as part of the prescriptive mammy characterization that the authors are unable to write around or against. This reveals that the mammy is something of a "tar baby"--a tar doll made famous in Joel Chandler Harris's famous Uncle Remus tales that appears and is used to entrap the wily trickster character called "Br'er (short for Brother) Rabbit." In those stories, the more that Br'er Rabbit fights the tar baby, the more entangled he becomes because he gets stuck in the very substance of his enemy. …

As Toni Morrison's 1981 novel, Tar Baby, draws to a close and the tension between the central characters, Jadine and Son, reaches its peak, the omniscient narration voices the questions that Morrison's readers have been grappling with since the novel's opening pages: "One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?" (269). Much of the initial critical conversation concerning Tar Baby revolves around efforts to determine where the reader's sentiments should lie. Are we to sympathize with Son, a sensitive man deeply attuned to his "ancient properties," whose concern with black folk values, community, and ancestral heritage are primary to his personal identity?1 Or, are we to invest in Jadine, the highly educated black model-the epitome of colonized beauty-who all but rejects her heritage and ancestry as incompatible with the fast-paced, modern, lifestyle that she associates with success? The conflicting forces at work within Tar Baby are, indeed, complex and frustrating. The novel's conclusion-in which Jadine returns to Paris, ostensibly to resume her glamorous lifestyle while Son runs, "lickety-split," away with the mythic blind and naked horsemen on the Isle des Chevaliers-provides no definitive answers (306). The fates of Son and Jadine do not satisfy the desire for a final statement about the possibility (or lack thereof) for reconciliation between modern expectations of Western "sophistication" and black cultural tradition. However, the call for a clear resolution to the novel is reductive. Toni Morrison's postmodern technique is such that it never resolves.2 Rather, she consistently pushes her reader toward further ethical wrangling, insisting upon the reader's obligation to struggle with the moral issues at hand.3 With this in mind, Jadine may not only be read as exemplary of the challenges to black identity in a post civil rights moment of racial "arrival"-in which civil rights such as equity and equality in the work force, education, etc. are advertised and celebrated as having been completely attained-but she also allows Morrison to confront notions of racial "selling out" that have been historically, and still remain, prominent within the African American community. It seems as though Jadine's final departure to Europe indicates a choice of selfishness and therein racial betrayal. However, selfishness is valenced throughout the novel in such a way that it requires Jadine and Morrison's readers to question whether selfishness in the name of autonomous selfhood is, in fact, synonymous with "selling out." This disorienting contradiction allows Morrison to direct both Jadine's and her reader's continued ethical examination toward issues of racial and cultural re-approachment as opposed to reading Jadine's departure to Europe as definitive racial betrayal.Randall Kennedy closely explores the notion of the "sellout" in contemporary Black America. He not only examines what it means to sell out, but also challenges common accusations of doing so in the name of achievement in the late twentieth century. Certain occupations, and certain requirements of some occupations, prompt accusations of selling out (64). Perhaps the greatest problem with the use of sellout rhetoric "involves determining what constitutes the best interest of blacks and the best means for achieving controversial goals" (72). Thus, in some situations, allegations of selling out are less than clearly defined. Taking care to note that "Sellout rhetoric and its concomitant attitudes, gestures, and strategies can prompt excessive self-censorship, truncate needed debate, and nurture demagoguery," Kennedy calls for the maintenance of a black solidarity that regulates sellout rhetoric in such a way that stimulates a certain thoughtful consideration of racial betrayal (84). In Tar Baby Morrison signals a similar ethical dilemma, refusing to position Jadine definitively as a sellout. …

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

Throughout Tar Baby, Morrison makes use of the original tar baby story in order to underscore the relationship between exploitation, commodity consumption, and social and economic domination. Commodities are presented as a dual snare that lead the novel's characters to pursue self-negating, individualistic activities and to repress the exploitative origins of wealth.

(2012). Introducing Charly Palmer: Tar Baby and Culturally Responsive Teaching. Art Education: Vol. 65, No. 6, pp. 6-11.

Much has been made of the fact that Jadine Childs, protagonist of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby (1981), circles back around to Europe, rather than North America or the Caribbean, at the close of the nov...

This paper attempts to apply a theoretical concept of heterotopia to the literary texts written by two contemporary African-American female novelists, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. For this purpose, I comb through space theory first, focusing on the political economy of space which views the history of space in sync with a cycle of the formation, establishment, decline, and dissolution of a community that populates it. I am particularly concerned in this process with the cultural ramification of a space, which I see as the birth of heterotopia. What makes a black community in the circum-Atlantic world a durable heterotopia is some agents` will to culture in their border-crossing diaspora. Dealing with the inseparability of the politics of location and the politics of identity, Morrison`s and Naylor`s complex characterization of such agents defies the reader who is tempted to dismiss African-American literary discourse as an essentialized one of the cultural nationalism. Both Morrison`s Tar Baby and Naylor`s Mama Day are situated in an imagined island outside the national borders or interests of the United States: the former is set in a fictional island named Isle des Chevaliers, which can be located somewhere around Dominica in the Caribbean, and the latter is set in a fictitious island called Willow Springs, which may be located in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Against these uncanny backdrops, Morrison and Naylor reveal the various ways in which people recognize, unrecognize, or misrecognize the meaning of space. To concern myself with the relationship between the heterotopic places and the diasporic agents is at once to dredge up the deep history of the black diaspora in the transatlantic world and to offer a solution to the unfinished question of U.S. race relations. This paper`s call for the recognition of the diasporic heterotopia in Tar Baby and Mama Day ultimately engages with the due attention to the subjectivity of marginalized people who are forgotten at ever accelerating speed in the age of globalization.

Drawing on critical whiteness studies, I examine a performance I did over 25 years ago in high school, in which I told a story at an awards program. I interpret my performance as later-day blackface minstrelsy—one without blackface, but with a black folktale and with ways of speaking and moving that my audience recognized as “black.” I build up my interpretation in three layers: the first treats my performance as grounded in a rural sensibility and closeness to the land; the second explores how white working folk created a black “other” who embodied what they longed for and despised; and the third recovers the (surprisingly) hopeful early moves of blackface minstrelsy—moves later abandoned, perverted, in the pursuit of money and respectability. In contrast to typical renderings of white racial identity in educational theory and research, the conception developed here assumes that the social production of white identity involves more than race and that a profound ambivalence exists at the core of w...

I heard Black for the first time in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, in the wake of the de-colonization and nationalistic struggles. Black was cre ated as a political category in a certain historical moment. It was created as a consequence of certain symbolic and ideological struggles. We said, "You have spent five, six, seven hundred years elaborating the symbolism through which Black is a negative factor. Now I don't want another term. I want that term, that negative one, that's the one I want. I want a piece of that action. I want to take it out of the way in which it has been articulated in religious discourse, in ethnographic discourse, in literary discourse, in visual discourse. I want to pluck it out of its articulation and rearticulate it in a new way." In that very struggle is a change of consciousness, a change of self recognition, a new process of identification, the emergence into visibility of a new subject. A subject that was always there, but emerging, historically.

Morrison’s mining of the dimensions of folktale that appeared so prominently in both Song of Solomon and Tar Baby had proved less expansive than she had hoped. She found that many of her readers were still caught up in an all-too-frequently bifurcated world, and much of that world’s bifurcation was premised on a black–white racial division that seemed to come naturally to readers’ minds because Toni Morrison was herself black. Even if Morrison had considered some of her uses of the folk ironic, readers seemed incapable of finding that irony when the African American author was drawing characters who were similarly African American.

Previous scholarship on relations between the United States and South Africa during the presidency of Richard Nixon has focused on the supposed close connections between the two countries, as well as the hypocrisy of Nixon's “Tar Baby” policy that publicly condemned apartheid while privately strengthening ties with the white minority government. New sources from South African archives show that relations between these two nations were not as close as previously believed. This article examines the opposition to Nixon's South African policy from American politicians and dissenters, the Soviet Union, liberated African nations, and the South African government itself. Dissent to Nixon's South African policy, while fleeting, would serve as inspiration for larger and more successful American protests against apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s. The novelty of throwing mud at South Africa has become outdated as time passed. It remains a fact that the South African economic power is starting to impress people. —B.J....

This essay looks at Toni Morrison's Tar Baby through the lens of black diaspora theory to uncover its gendered critique of black nationalism. Further, it suggests that Morrison uses two distinct modes - myth and realism – to construct two different representations of diaspora. While the conception of diaspora at the mythic level affirms unity, the representation of diaspora at the realist level makes apparent the fact of fracture. In this way, even as Morrison provides us with an injunction to revere tradition, she simultaneously deconstructs the basis for articulating a stable vision of what such tradition might look like.

(2004). Finding the Door: Vision/Revision and Stereotype in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 12-26.

This article analyses Br’er Rabbit, a trickster character in African-American folklore. As a trickster Br’er Rabbit possesses a paradoxical nature. On the one hand, Br’er Rabbit acts as a hero but on the other hand, he constantly plays tricks on others and by doing so, he is also violating the prevailing values. These two opposing aspects of trickster’s nature offer an interesting subject for the research. The questions considered worth focusing on in discussing the subject are: How can trickster character be described? What values are represented by trickster character? Is there any shift in the description and represented values in different media and over time? The study presented in this article was aimed at investigating the transformation of how the trickster is characterized and values represented by trickster Br’er Rabbit in Uncle Remus’ folktale version of “The Wonderful Tar Baby (1881) and The Laughing Place” (1903) written by Joel Chandler Harries and the same trickster character in the same stories featured in Disney’s “Song of the South” (1946). By comparing and contrasting both narratives in different media and eras, it is uncovered that there are some changes on the depiction and nature as well as values represented by Br’er Rabbit, the trickster character. The study presented in this article was aimed at investigating the transformation of values represented by trickster Br’er Rabbit in Uncle Remus’ folktale version of “Tar Baby and The Laughing Place” (1879) written by Joel Chandler Harries and the same trickster character in the same stories featured in Disney’s “Song of the South.” The research questions of this study are answered by applying Barths’ theory and method in studying headlines news. This model of research enables the researcher to understand and interprete values represented by the trickster character in different times and media.

The question of alienation has always been a pervasive theme in the history of modern thought, and it occupies a considerable place in contemporary work. Literature in general, and fiction in particular, raise this issue to reveal its influence on human beings and communities. Novelists have been trying to unravel its complexities and concomitant consequences. The paper aims to explore the experience of alienation through depicting the issue not as a purely racial reality, or something restricted to the colour of the skin or gender of the victim. It is rather presented as a distressing state which cripples the victims and makes them susceptible captives of the dominant forces. In the selected novels, Toni Morrison has delved deep into the experience of alienation through her male and female characters, showing the different forms of this experience. The present research investigates Morrison’s portrayal of the issue from an African-American prospect. References will be made to novels such as Tar Baby, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.

Both Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me feature young, modern, black women who are removed from their homelands by virtue of their childhoods spent in literal and f...