en AMERICAN CULTURE AND UNDERSTANDINGS OF BLACKNESS
  • Sava,  Ioan
    UNIVERSITATEA „VASILE ALECSANDRI” DIN BACĂU, ROMÂNIA
Abstract
Around the latter half of the 1960’s, in the academic circles around the world, and especially in the American academy, race and ethnicity came to the forefront as a new and important approach to the study of literature. Theorists belonging to all sorts of ethnic minority groups – Asian, African, Hispanic, etc. – became actively concerned with identity problems and with representing the white majority’s others. They became involved with the way in which the life of ethnic minorities was represented in a society dominated for centuries by white interests and cultural institutions. They were among the first to realize that race was a social and cultural construct rather than a biological one. The new scholarship on race laid the foundations of a new and productive direction in literary and cultural studies. How this set of ideas is reflected in Toni Morrison’s non-fiction and the way American dominant white culture defines itself in relation to a centuries old Africanist presence are the subject-matters of this paper.