Cultural Artifacts and How They Affect Women and Men’s Body Image - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 4 Words: 1137 Downloads: 2 Date added: 2019/10/10 Did you like this example? A culture can be described as a certain way of thinking, judging, feeling and acting over a period of time becoming part and parcel of a people or a society. A certain culture can be classified as a family one, organizational culture, traditional culture, popular culture and many others (Narayan 177). For instance, since the 1980s, blue-chip companies and mega corporations have entrenched a certain code of conduct or performance amongst their circles. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Cultural Artifacts and How They Affect Women and Men’s Body Image" essay for you Create order Management consultants and theorists have popularized and described such institutions with their distinct languages, dress code, appearances, norms, and laws. These cultures or norms shape and govern the individuals working there and those aspiring to end in the same careers (Shields 19). In the same way, the popular culture has entrenched its own kind of norms, laws, beliefs, traditions amongst others which dictate anyone indulging in it to toe a certain line. In this light, this paper will be seeking to unearth certain cultural artifacts in the popular culture that are dictating the growth or advancement of both women and men’s body image. The popular culture entails current events and trends in the society, such as technology, nutrition, entertainment, media, lifestyles, etc. The artifacts, in particular, to be discussed in this paper includes will include a patriarchy society and its effects on how women view beauty. The other artifact will be the media and its current glo rification of masculinity which tends to affect how men nowadays think of their images too. The two artifacts have caused widespread and long-term norms and behaviors regarding the physical looks of both men and women in our contemporary society. The paper will go ahead and indulge scientific materials and expert resources previously touching on these artifacts, and then draw a conclusion or a summary of the discussion presented henceforth. The female body has for long been a center of attention and a cultural artifact since the time immemorial. Since the dawn of civilization, many symbols, sculptures and certain beliefs using the female body have sprung up. For instance, the sign of fertility during the early ages was a woman figure or sign. Today still, the female body still draws such admiration and a talking point. This is mainly because of how patriarchy has lingered up to date, and the society has almost given up on trying to reduce or eradicate the male dominion over the human race. Our societies and governments are still heavily infested with mean and arrogant males who have successfully been able to exclude a huge percentage of women from positive contribution to the wellbeing of our society or progressive leadership (Shields 37). The practice is commonest in the developing and middle-income economies where women have been relegated to housewife duties, reproduction and upbringing of children. That means that m en have crafted rules and policies, traditions and customs that give them an edge over women in almost all aspects of life. And in the context of this paper, the paper will pay greater emphasis on the effects of a male dominated society on how women view their bodies and beauty in general. As earlier noted, the male leadership has swiftly set up a perception of what a beautiful woman looks like or what she has to have to be considered pretty or appealing. The western world pop culture has and continues to glorify very slim and lean women as beautiful and the opposite to be ugly (Helman 152). This tradition is witnessed by more and more women and girls desperately striving to lose weight to look like certain celebrities. The brainwashing of the female species on their body weights and figures has been orchestrated by the popular media such as talk shows, fashion magazines, fancy entertainment joints hiring anorexic ladies as waiters or entertainers amongst others (Narayan 234). Over a period of time, the girl child starts seeing slim as the sexy and attractive and thus get into a situation of self-hate and low esteem amongst peers. Researchers from the Harvard University showed that girls as young as nine years in America experience self-esteem issue on their weight, owing to what they see around or hear from the media, bullying in school against the ladies with a considerable body weight is common amongst the teens (Helman 112). The experts recorded scenarios of girls that young starting to â€Å"diet† so as to lose weight and look like their â€Å"attractiveâ₠¬  slim peers or their supposed role models who are always sportspersons, fashion designers, musicians, politicians amongst others. This is a wrong perception that is most likely corrupt our children and women in their blind pursuit to become beautiful. Research has linked serious disease conditions such as bulimia and anorexia nervosa to eating disorders. Previously, it used to be believed that women only were the ones harboring insecurities over the looks of their bodies, but not anymore. Experts have shown that currently, about 25 percent of men nowadays suffer some forms of uncertainties how they look or their beauty (Narayan 219). This tendency can be partly explained by the increased media campaigns advertising some kind of body looks which are slowly sinking into the minds of many men. For instance, many fashion magazines feature men with stunning, flawless looks; with great hair, abs, dental formulae, posture, among other attributes. In general, what these adverts on Televisions and fancy music tells us is that women and girls love masculine men, and thus those without are more â€Å"women† or girlish than men. The entire society has also fallen victim to this analogy, always reading contempt on those men without enough muscles or energy like a stallion. This is witnessed mostly when less muscled boys or men are seen or thought as homosexuals by the society (Shields 43). The cloth line DG has an advertisement which portrays three men with great biceps and abs surrounded by women, with a caption going like, â€Å"One must try them out and see how sexy they will make you feel.† This promotion not only makes men believe that they will look like the ones in the advert itself but gives the potential customer an ill perception of an attractive man. Experts notes that most of these models do not look as exactly as they are made to look on the pictures, since most of the images are edited afterwards and gives virtual attributes non-existent to the common man so as to have the â€Å"wow† factor and convince the potential clients that the clothing will delete their shortcomings and look as attractive as those in the media. The same strategy is used by liquor advertising companies which show men in expensive suits, cars, watches, accessories and posh surroundings mostly in the company of submiss ive women yearning for the man. This behavior as seen many men with body image uncertainties to buy unnecessary materials and lifestyles to try and cover their shortcomings (Helman 152).

Depression Is The First Leading Cause Of Suicide - 1496 Words

Today in America, depression is the first leading cause of suicide. Reported in recent statistics, every year, thousands of people succeed in taking their lives and even more have attempted suicide at some point (Hyde and Held 8). Although it is an afflicting concern today, depression dates back to centuries ago, but wasn t fully recognized as a clinical illness until the 1960 s. At this point, depression treatment was only available to adults because it was so unlikely for adolescents to experience from depression (Peacock 32). In the 1920 s, people thought of depression as a â€Å"women s sickness† because they did not understand it s complexity (Hyde and Held 34). Treatments for depression were first prescribed in the late 1950 s. The treatments that were available were medicine and pills, but after thorough research (because depression was becoming a rising issue) of causes of depression, physicians found that they could treat depression through therapy sessions, depending on its severity. Depression arose in the 1980 s, and was taken more seriously as suicide rates began to increase. Depression is a clinical illness that is derived from emotional detachment which typically results from traumatic experiences (Childhood Adolescent Depression). According to Judith Peacock, author of Teen Suicide, depression is more serious than feeling sad for a few days. Depression can affect someone for weeks, months, and in common cases, years (Peacock 37). When a person encountersShow MoreRelatedTeen Suicide Is The Third Leading Cause Death For High School Students1396 Words   |  6 PagesOver the years teen suicide has increased tremendously. 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Personal Imaginitive Coursework Free Essays

I trekked slowly across scorching sands; the beach was bare and inert, the searing sun too much for most, who took refuge in the shade. My mouth parched and dry, I licked my lips; my sweat tasted too salty. I dragged my unwilling limbs further along. We will write a custom essay sample on Personal Imaginitive Coursework or any similar topic only for you Order Now In the background I could hear weary birds groaning under the sun,s ruthless blaze, they seemed to be circling me slowly, waiting to pounce. The vast, clear waters seemed lifeless, there were no amiable waves; there were not even small ripples. The ever present fish had decided to seek safe haven in the ocean’s limitless shelters. I felt alone, secluded and dejected. I gently closed my eyes: Where was it? Would she be there? Was I late? These questions overwhelmed me. I quickly opened my eyes. In the distance stood a very small and trivial hut, I could barely make out any significant detail, however I knew it was where I needed to be. I started walking, with a new found energy, towards it ignoring the surroundings. The hot and heavy sand baked my bare feet subsequently causing me great pain. The humid and muggy air caused my eyes to water as I focused all my attention on the hut. As I got closer to the hut I could make out its finer details; it seemed a battered old construction with little in terms of modern architecture. The substandard paint that covered its cheap bricks was peeling at the far edges. The decayed wooden panels had lost their pristine newness long ago and had now become antiques that belonged in a museum of a desolate town. The ocean’s rage was reflected in its rotting foundations. The hut had seen it all over the decades. She was already there and I was late. On viewing the fetid diving suits I was shocked. The suit was muddy and grimy. Its surface was no-longer new; it was instead coated in a thick layer of mire that had partially dried making the suit rigid. Reluctantly I put it on. Its tough fabric caused my skin to itch frantically. I ignored all of this as much as I could by focusing my thoughts elsewhere. For what seemed like an eternity I had played with the thought of being deep underwater: Would I feel crushed under the weight of the ocean? Would I run out of oxygen and suffer an excruciating death? I had my questions and I was soon going to find out the answers to them. The old engine roared deafeningly behind us as we travelled out to sea. I could feel its uneven vibrations running through me, adding to the nervousness I was keeping concealed inside. The beach was a distant memory and the heat no longer seemed to exist. I looked over at my diving partner. I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was as anxious as I was. We stopped in the middle of a vast ocean, the coast was no longer visible; we were alone. The suns powerful reflection dazzled all around us. We put on our goggles and set up our tanks. As soon as we had done this we positioned ourselves on the edge of the boat. I closed my eyes, ready, and dropped into the blue world beneath. It was like going to sleep and waking up in a surreal dream. It can only be described as illusory. I felt completely different; my whole body felt tranquil, sharing a unity with the ocean. I followed her deeper and deeper into the ocean’s depths; every thing I saw was new to me. I saw a shoal of sapphire coloured fish swimming by swiftly beneath me. Their presence created a gap in my mind; I wanted to find out more about the ocean and its colourful inhabitants. After several more minutes of diving down we reached the bed. It was littered with coral. A diver will never find two corals exactly alike. It is in this mysterious and irregular aura which makes coral of significant beauty. It was very difficult to examine what was amongst the coral as light was partially absent there. The sand on the bed was in a wave-like pattern. Around me there were various fish swimming around almost purposefully, fish were appearing and disappearing every few seconds. There appeared to be small dwellings where groups of fish congregated amongst themselves. It seemed as if the fish had their own society, distant from the human world. I felt a gentle palm rest on my shoulder. She was pointing apologetically to the surface. It was clear that neither of us wanted to leave. We rose much quicker than we had descended; the oceans upward thrust almost throwing us out of its territory. As we approached the surface, I felt as if I had got to known the ocean and appreciate its hidden wonders. We surfaced and climbed onto the boat. I felt sad; as if I had left a part of me behind. How to cite Personal Imaginitive Coursework, Papers

Great Gatsby Lifestyles Essay Example For Students

Great Gatsby Lifestyles Essay The wealthy lifestyles of the Buchanans and Miss Jordan have morally corruptedtheir lives. Money has created boredom for them. Their ways of perceiving lifeand their altitudes towards other is vain. But each of them shows off theirvanity in different ways. Tom Buchanan, for example, believes that whitecivilization is going to pieces and will be utterly submerged by the otherraces. The Rise of the Coloured Empires has reinforced his perception that hisrace is more civilized. This book has made Tom believe that it is all scientificand true. He does not realize that he is a racist. He thinks that just becausethe white race has more wealth, that they should be in control of society. MissBaker shows off her vanity in her actions. In the vehicle with Nick, Jordaninsisted she receive special privileges because of her wealth and celebritystatus. Her comment, Theyll keep out of my way, implies that otherdrivers will keep out of her way. She has a spoiled altitude towards because shethinks she owns the road. She is also hypocritical because she hates carelesspeople even though she is a careless driver herself. Daisy Buchanan expressesher vanity in the words she says. For example, she once said, Ive beeneverywhere and seen everything and love everything, implying that she hasbeen around the globe and seen everything there is to offer. She thinks that shecan solve the problems of the world because she has gone to a few more placesthan other people have and that she knows more than other people do. Her wealthhas given her the opportunity to visit extraordinary places, but it has alsogiven her boredom. She has taken her money for granted and now she has too muchfree time. Money has given the Buchanans and Miss Baker everything they had everwanted. It has enriched their lives and their lifestyles. But it has also madetheir altitude towards others vain. Their wealth has revealed their vanity forthe rest of the world to see. BibliographyFitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby

Allied Appeasement of Hitler at Munich free essay sample

Analyzes historical, political military causes effects of surrender of western Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) by Britain and France to Hitlers Germany in 1938. In the history of the Second World War, Munich is a name that carries powerful connotations. It was in Munich that Adolf Hitler launched the abortive Beer-Hall Putscht, his abortive first attempt at power. A decade and a half later, in September of 1938, Hitler had been in power for six years, and Munich became the site of even a more powerfully symbolic event. Here, the Western allied powers faced their last potential decision point short of the one which would confront them with the invasion of Poland a year later. Hitler demanded the right to occupy the Sudetenland, a region of western Czechoslovakia that had a largely German-speaking population. The Czechs were prepared to resist, but despite a fairly powerful army they lacked the means to do so entirely alone. We will write a custom essay sample on Allied Appeasement of Hitler at Munich or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The question was whether the Western Allies..

REL212 WEEK 4 Example

REL212 WEEK 4 Example REL212 WEEK 4 – Term Paper Example Religion and Theology Religion and Theology Wu Wei refers to a concept of Daoism that means knowing when to act or not to act. It also means a natural action. An aspect of Taoism is not to act but do everything. Non-doing is a spontaneous and effortless action. The aspect is immensely practical in the west as people experience themselves as part of unity of life. The city dwellers are, therefore, in a position to maintain balance and harmony (Bowler, 2010, p. 23).This is an appropriate way for a person to live his/her life since it implies an activity that is natural, spontaneous, and without effort. It also promotes ones ability to learn and listen to both voices of environment and ones own voices. This enables us to heed intelligence for both body and mind.Paradox of Wu WeiThis arises since the statement is contradictory in nature. A good example of the paradox is a matter of how one act without acting. People try not to try by making it understandable and easy as if not trying. To eliminate the paradox, this means act on something before it comes into existence (Huang, and Chia, 2005, p. 11).Powers that a Confucius’ Superior Person as a modern-day super hero would haveToday, superior person posses’ powers like wealth, advanced education, and influential positions in church and the government. The person would use his character of benevolence to combat evil. This is a person who has considerable influence on the people and an optimistic view of the nature of human beings. They appreciate heaven as a personal and positive force in the universe (Huang, and Chia, 2005, p. 14).Someone who meets Confucius’ characteristics for a Superior PersonKong Fu meets the Confucius characteristics of a superior person. Superior people make their thoughts sincere; their objective must be truth and does not set their mind against anything or for anything. Kong, a philosopher positively influenced the life of East Asians through his teachings. He believed th at if one knows the truth and do not act on it, then he/she lacks courage. He ensured that he delivered all the vital information to the people (Bowler, 2010, p. 29).The past assignments have made me realize the importance of avoiding violation of moral principles. They have made me mature into a superior person who copes with the prevailing situations. I am more concerned of virtue, composed and satisfied as opposed to concentrating on comfort.ReferencesBowler, P. (2010). The Completely Superior Persons Book of Words: Bloomsbury PublishingHuang, T., Chia, M. (2005). The secret teachings of the Tao te ching: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

The rule in Salomon v Salomon & Co [1897] AC 22 has been described as Essay - 3

The rule in Salomon v Salomon & Co [1897] AC 22 has been described as one of the corner stones of English Company Law. Discuss the rationale and impact of the decision on company law - Essay Example This decision was reached to protect the company shareholders from being sued by creditors to pay up unresolved arrears in case the company became bankrupt. Mr. Salomon Aron ran a successful business that manufactured leather boots and shoes. Once his sons came of age, they developed a particular interest in joining their father to run the business. In fact, they wanted to be partners of their father in the same business. Mr. Salomon therefore made a decision to convert his business into a limited entity. The business was bought from Mr. Salomon by the new company at 39000 pounds. This amount however far much superseded the real value of the business. In addition, Mr. Salomon included his spouse and his other five kids as enterprise subscribers. His two sons, as his own nominees became the company’s directors. With this kind of an arrangement, it essentially meant that the company was in reality Mr. Salomon’s. Out of the company’s total shares of 20,007, Salomon owned and controlled 20,001 shares. On 1st of June 1892, the company was legally and officially incorporated. Furthermore, the company dished out debentures worth 10000 pounds to Salomon. These are form of liability that has no collateral or physical resources as security. Its only security is the solvency and standing of the issuer. As part of the safety to his debentures, Salomon acknowledged 5000 pounds from Edmund Broderip. However, just after the business was integrated, the enterprise began to go down as the sale of boots astronomically deteriorated. The problems were worsened by constant strike of workers. The major market for Salomon was the government and so in a bid to sidestep the danger of its providers being crippled by the forays, the government went ahead and fragmented the contracts (J Armour, 2003). Eventually, the business was botched. He shirked on interest returns on the debentures, half of which were held by Broderip.

Understanding Plagiarism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Understanding Plagiarism - Essay Example The kind of information that must be acknowledged and documented in written assignments include the name of the person who wrote the piece, the exact date of the publication from where the matter has been taken, the publication or the article that is being used with the exact title, page numbers, volume details and so on. All the pertinent information would then facilitate the academic writing checker to gauge the authenticity of the written piece. However those pieces written by the writer himself and are referred to as his personal thoughts usually do not require any citation or source at all. These written documents are usually the personal reflections of the people who are actually penning down what they think about a particular subject. Any viewpoint which is the writer’s very own must not be cited because this is exclusive to him and is considered his own work. If one is borrowing the same words of someone else, then it is a must that the citations are provided so that the work is not regarded as plagiarized. This is important as it gives the actual writer the much needed attention that he deserves with respect to his work. It also allots significance to the fact that the academic writer has made use of others’ works and properly credited them for their respective work areas (Cryer 2000). Outside sources must also be used when work is paraphrased because the main content is of the original author that made use of the text within his written piece in essence. This is an important barometer for measuring the depth of genuineness within work and hence gives a good indicator as to whether someone has taken information from someone else or written it by his own self. Paraphrasing is a good thing but it must be done in such a way that it brings the viewpoint of the academic writer within the written piece as well. He must not change the w ords alone rather provide his own inputs so that the written piece is elaborate

Accountancy is not a profession Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Accountancy is not a profession - Essay Example In the period between 1933 and 1934, there occurred tremendous growth in the financial markets and their structure and level of organization improved considerably. That growth can be attributed to the audited financial data’s reliability to a considerable extent (Antle and Suner, 2007). However, over the last decade, a wave of scandals has shaken the structure of accountancy as a profession. The debate surrounding the professional status of accountancy can be traced back to the early 20th century. The supreme court of one of the states in the early 20th century referred to accountancy as a â€Å"business† that did not benefited the public like the â€Å"profession of law†, and further said that the laws of accountancy â€Å"have been passed in the interest of those engaged in the business and for their protection and advantage rather than in the interest of the public welfare† (Turnburee, 1946, p. 47). Profession has been defined as â€Å"a calling, occup ation, or vocation distinguished from a trade or handicraft† (Webster cited in Turnburee, 1946, p. 47). On the other hand, accountancy has been defined as â€Å"the art as well as the science of recording, classifying, summarizing of business transactions in terms of money within an accounting or financial year, with the help of principles and techniques† (Banerjee, 2010, p. 4). ... Formation of such organizations has increased the demand of clarification of the rules. When the accountants get any pressure from the management or are sued, they tend to approach the rule-making organizations and express their concern over lack of clarification of rules in particular cases. Rules are always secondary to professional judgment. â€Å"In the big picture, this shift in emphasis from judgment to rules has damaged their professionalism. No profession can rely on rules as the main basis for its work† (Sunder cited in Antle and Sunder, 2007). The professional status of accountancy has also been challenged by many accountants. For example, the accountant David Logan at the IRIS World Event arranged at Twickenham warned the fellows that accountancy is increasingly becoming a trade rather than a profession; â€Å"I used to have seven audits, but I could do 95% of my business without being registered. We’re competing with anybody who can set up as a bookkeeper. If someone is made redundant and sets up on their own, you can’t compete with that† (Logan cited in Stokdyk, 2012). The recent changes made to the audit exemption criteria have made things even worse as the firms have started to do the works of accountancy without an accountant. These days, many large companies do such works as filing the accounts and bookkeeping without the help of accountants and still no objections are raised by the government (Stokdyk, 2012). Although the government provides business with the relaxation of red tape, yet the accountants are facing restrictions from various avenues for making income. Another accountant Paul Scholes encouraged

Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature

Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Chapter One: Toni Morrisons Contribution to American Literature Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed. Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrisons lifelong work has been an accurate reflection of her and her races upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt both directly and vicariously. To be more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of whether we â€Å"read† them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself and w hose projections â€Å"fall† on the surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded is not hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs. My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together. (Rustin) Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out, especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve, resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation with mind-numbing senseless conformity . One may never tell where artistry begins and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things. If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrisons undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity, conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom. Racial Formation and Toni Morrisons Literary Manifest Racial formation never has never been and never will be (one could safely imagine) a smooth and linear phenomenon of innocuous application. Not only that, but never has there been a time in American history when race wasnt a troublesome matter, from the initial clash between the early settlers who achieved the â€Å"conquest of paradise† and the native population, through every aspect of affirmative action, to present frictions with and around immigrants and the border (i.e. with Mexico), all still wrapped in the warm blanket of the American covenant. The exodus of people crossing the ocean has always been a defining feature of the rugged American fabric and trouble and tension an inherent aftermath, for as Thomas Sowell puts it:    The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all human history. Over the years, the massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. (qtd. in Girgus 64) Even though noble rank has been outlawed by the very Constitution of the United States, this does not necessarily ensure the homogeneity of multiethnicity. The social tension described by American sociologist Thomas Sowell and quoted by Sam B. Girgus in â€Å"The New Ethnic Novel and the American Idea† is that caused by the conflicting values brought to the American land, together with languages, customs, and, more importantly, creeds and moral values that this veritable Tower of Babel is still finding very difficult to take in and transform into a meld of acceptable conformity. A tendency existed and steeply evolved in the not very long course of American history to assert the superiority of the Aryan waspish faction of the American nation over all other non-Aryan groups. Since the budding nations ideals have always been slightly adumbrated by the skulking presence of slavery, the African-American paradigm of socio-cultural and political struggle has been conferred upon speci al significance and attention. As such, the status of African-Americans has undergone severe and painful shifts, from the moment they were brought to America as slaves, until at least quite recently. These days, the life of African-Americans in the United States is undoubtedly improved, a fact which can easily be proven by the recent election of the first â€Å"black† president in the entire history of this country. Not only at the highest level, but in all walks of life evidence exists of inclusion in the earnest of members of society belonging to the African-American race.   Albeit banned on some level for instance Executive Order 8802 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned outright discrimination in the case of jobs related to the federal government and defence contractors open discrimination continued throughout the decades, the segregation and gerrymandering trailing for many decades. Several boiling pressures, however, undermined these discriminatory tactics, such as the Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. These and other actions precipitated the adoption of affirmative action, a bomb which exploded in the face of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had to make efforts to redress these social injustices through as some like to call it â€Å"positive† or â€Å"reverse† discrimination, in spite of Martin Luther King Jr.s dream, a veritable gem of rhetoric. His world-famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech is a watershed moment not only for the Civil Rights Movement a cause that i s brilliantly, persuasively and most important, peacefully championed but for every group that during the course of (American) history had been discriminated against. In it he advocates equality and fraternity, the vital prerequisites of coexistence in a sphere so decidedly multiethnic that, as Herman Melville phrases it, â€Å"You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.† (qtd. in Girgus 65). The attitude taken by American people concerning the preference for or against affirmative action is linked to what everyone was educated to believe. The factor that leaves the greatest imprint on our mind is education and the vehicles for achieving this, such as literature, films, and other media, to say nothing of standardized school curricula and society at large. It is the first of these vehicles that will be investigated in what follows, tracing Toni Morrisons efforts as an epitomic endeavour, in order to isolate its influence on our belief system, values and life choices. Significantly, an original national literature was the first mark of Americas declaration of independence from Europes influence and the African-American one the declaration of independence from â€Å"white† hegemony. Benjamin Franklin believed that â€Å"A good example is the best sermon† (qtd. in Marcovitz 55), while Emerson, the father of transcendentalism urged the American people to be self-reliant above all. Though a maverick at heart throughout his entire glorious existence which, while dappled with tragedy, his work has been no less prolific in spite of all his hardships and his originality, humour and unmatched industriousness Mark Twain, The Father of American Literature, has been a most controversial and compliant figure (only in the sense of providing such an inspiring string of examples in the sense of self-reliance) in his time and continues to be so even today. If at first his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was criticized for the language and subject matter by both his contemporaries and later admirers (Ernest Hemingway would provide a notable example) for being trite and vulgar and even excoriated by public libraries such as the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts or New Yorks Brooklyn Public Library, recent controversy has been focused around racial matters. Critics are split between those regarding the portrayal of Jim as disparaging and as a consequence offensive and those who find Jims superstitious behaviour to be an indication of an alternative perception of our bond with nature, or a more powerful connection with our spiritual side, to say nothing of the steep dissonance between the Waspish past and the politically correct present. In Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is analysed from the perspective of the importance of the Africanist presence, a presence much silenced and only timidly analyzed for decades. Discussed in terms of socio-historic development, the distinction between â€Å"black† and â€Å"white† themed by Twains novel reaches a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Toni Morrisons interpretation. This can be verified by the juxtaposition between Jims utter love for his masters and the â€Å"baroque† (Morrison 57) torture Huck and Tom subject him to. The â€Å"white† line of argumentation is brilliantly outlined in Mark Twains masterpiece and shrewdly detected by Morrison, who finds Jim â€Å"unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate†, which is exactly how the â€Å"others† are perceived. The religious, scientific, political, cultural and societal practices were so fas hioned around the time when Mark Twain lived as to legitimate slavery and abuse. Starting from the assertion that white people around Jim seek forgiveness and supplication veritable keystone concepts in Christian religions which, however, did not extend to everyone, considering the hovering doubt about the existence of the soul of the â€Å"others†, they (i.e. religions through their cloistered leaders) instead providing convenient ways for turning a blind eye on slavery and even extermination on condition that he accept his inferiority. Thus, she argues, only a representative of the African-American race could have been painfully humiliated by children after being presented as a father and an adult, while no one, not even a white convict, could have been submitted to this kind of treatment. Toni Morrisons discourse is by no means vituperative: she does not intend any reversed oppression through her writing, either in Playing in the Dark or in any of her works of fiction. However, her writing is so compelling that when Beloved does not win her the National Book Award, as many as forty-eight African-American authors and critics write to the New York Times claiming her literary prowess, which afterwards earns her the laurels of the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. Her lack of bias is evident when she praises the former President Bill Clinton calling him the â€Å"first black President, since he displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas† (Cooke), while her discursive equanimity can be traced from the way she analyses the Africanist presence in literature and the way it is regarded from the perspective of its relationship to mainstream literature and criticism: Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. (Playing in the Dark 13) While she does not wish to challenge or criticise anyone for their views and choices, Toni Morrison cannot bear to look the other way when the literary Jim Crow era is still so fiercely enforced. That it might be convenient for anyone to ignore any slice of reality or exclude any of the fibres in the fabric of a nation is quite obvious, and while this approach does not impair our intellect, it does however limit our understanding. This selective interpretation of things which leaves Africanist representation in a cone of darkness is especially significant, since it underpins racism and it bolsters its moral justification, especially along the lines of racial formation: a deeply-seated phenomenon which pervades every aspect of life in America and a very hurtful process for those slighted by it. The relevance of racial formation is underscored throughout Toni Morrisons work and, in their extensive study entitled Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Michae l Omi and Howard Winant, the two American sociologists who developed racial formation theory, argue that race is an artificial concept, because the bases according to which any particular individual can be labelled as â€Å"white†, â€Å"black†, and so on, may start from certain biological traits, but race transcends these. To illustrate the point, a person of â€Å"mixed blood† is considered from the point of view of North American and then Latin American racial identification whereby the same categorization would have the same individual first â€Å"black† and then unable to â€Å"pass† as â€Å"black†. At the other extreme, Brazilian legislation is willing to accept the assignation of several racial categories to various members of the same family. In addition to being intricate and far-reaching, these considerations help provide grounding for our study of Toni Morrisons work and its impact on American literature and even life in America and also help account for the perception of other races by the early settlers, whose religious and even scientific tenets had to be broached to accommodate these â€Å"new† categories, such as the â€Å"noble savage,† and dispute the very existence of their soul. This blatant dismissal of a persons soul based solely on the abstract and arbitrary consideration of race is an outrage that Toni Morrison starkly exposes in Beloved, about which Susanna Rustin comments the following in â€Å"The Guardian†: It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised, a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human. (Rustin) Sethe, her heroine, learns the truth and is shocked to realise that her masters, whom she is so devoted to, are taught to distinguish between her human and animal characteristics, which means, in other words, that she is but a soulless beast of burden. Thats when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And dont forget to line them up. I commenced to walk backward, didnt even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. [] Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. (Beloved 224) This episode in Sethes existence can never be erased nor her pain alleviated. The suffering she is caused is absolute and boundless. Her feelings of outrage surge like torrents in her brain and she feels utterly discombobulated. This memory will forever haunt her; it will shape her future and her attitude towards life, her behaviour towards her children, and it will serve as a constantly open wound. Whats even more tragic is that this mind-boggling injustice spared no one: men, women, or children. Remembering his own price, down to the cent, that schoolteacher was able to get for him, he wondered what Sethes would have been. What had Baby Suggs been? How much did Halle owe, still, besides his labor? What did Mrs. Garner get for Paul F? More than nine hundred dollars? How much more? Ten dollars? Twenty? Schoolteacher would know. He knew the worth of everything. It accounted for the real sorrow in his voice when he pronounced Sixo unsuitable. (266) Proceeding along these lines of dehumanization, monetary worth is assigned to each individual and that is the extent of ones value when assessed by the slave owner. Reality is raw, harsh, and beyond shocking, but sugar-coating it would not help if we are to learn the truth about racism and racial formation. The accuracy of Toni Morrisons writing in spite of the degree of fictionalization is the keystone of her discourse. It is her head-on confrontation of the underlying reality that lends Toni Morrison her uniqueness and that has earned her in equal measure respect and criticism. Despite the narrative voices that assert their own individuality in Toni Morrisons works, Sam B. Girgus comments on present-day African-American literary discourse, finding it too elaborate, and somewhat digressive to the detriment of thematic concerns such as the daily life, values, sorrows, tragedies, successes, woes, accomplishments, and so forth. He argues his point by referring to African-American writers Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: both Morrison and Gates typify qualities of ethnicity that are common to many of the writers in the literary and cultural renaissance under discussion. They all write in English even when extolling a particular vernacular speech, dialect, or region. They are all extremely sophisticated artists who use the most complex modern and postmodern techniques to convey their highly individualized visions of experience. Although rooted in ethnic communities and concrete historic situations, their works as cultural artifacts and products are nevertheless aspects of complicated technological and bureaucratic systems of cultural and social production that often differ from the language, values, and daily life of the cultures for which they speak. (Girgus 61) This may be so if we for instance pick up Toni Morrisons Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved where we find passages of stream of consciousness, dialectal dialogue, flashbacks from the past and the conflation of past and present resulting in a destabilized horizon of racial and individual formation. Toni Morrisons formal education may have driven a wedge between herself and the culture she was born into and which she proudly represents, but she still manages to put together an incredible manifesto that reaches deeper truths and meanings with absolute valences. In her novel the three heroines mother and two daughters have overlapping individualities and they represent good and evil in equal measure. Their existences are nonlinear and they run both ways along the temporal axis. This is especially true of Sethe, the mother, whose past still haunts her and impacts greatly her present and future; an impact which extends to her family as well. The state of nonlinearity, conflation, and duality is also found in other novels, such as The Bluest Eye or Sula, in which the heroines manage to become displaced from their status, they are isolated from their respective families and friends, and are forced into pursuing painful valences of individuality. From this point of view, Toni Morrison herself manages to overreach her scope by challenging the perceptions, values, mores, and principles we are ingrained with by society and education. Agnes Suranyi, a contributor to â€Å"The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison†, edited by Justine Tally, expresses just such a view: â€Å"The borderline between decent women and man-eating prostitutes is erased; only the latter are capable of giving love to Pecola, whose quest for it elsewhere is futile.† (16-17). This view is of great significance because it epitomizes Toni Morrisons take on life: nothing in her work is â€Å"fed† to us already masticated; it is quite the c ontrary that occurs: we have to interpret the facts stated, the innuendoes, the streams of consciousness, the multifaceted and split personalities, their actions and inactions all by ourselves, through our own filters and open up to a more thorough interpretation that must override dated tenets.     Ã‚   Applying the above stated, upon perusing Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, one cannot miss the connection between melding and overlapping identities and the life of people struggling with racial formation and being forced into conformity and assimilation. This assertion is further reinforced by the fact that Sethe lived in the time of the Underground Railroad, a time which saw a sharp increase in the severity of punishments for escaping bondage. The tenseness of life on the black / white divide is passed on to later generations who carry on with their incessant frictions all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond. In a 2004 interview with Rachel Cooke for â€Å"The Observer† Toni Morrison successfully proves why the battle with racism is not yet over, in spite of all the things that have changed since the beginning of affirmative action. I dont pass without insults. Let me give you an example. I walk into the Waldorf Astoria in New York to check in. Were going to have a drink, and then my friend is going to go home. She stands behind me, as I check in. Finally, the guy says, Oh, are you registering too? He thought I was the maid. My friend was trembling with anger. It was so personal. But the irony of it was that I was on the cover of a magazine that month, and there were these posters with my face on them all over New York. (qtd. in â€Å"The Observer†) The Bluest Eye her debut novel for instance, has had its popularity delayed many a year precisely because of the stark way in which Toni Morrison approached taboo subjects and because she strived to prove that â€Å"black† did not equal â€Å"ugly†. Growing up is difficult and the girls in the novel find their race assignation which is no fault of theirs a difficult burden to carry around. They do not have the easier lives of the lighter-skinned people in their community and their perceived ugliness is a feature which gradually seeps into their consciousness to such a degree that it becomes overbearing. The validity of this externally-imposed ugliness is reinforced not only by the white members of society, but by the very families themselves. In Pecolas case, her own mother finds her daughter repulsive and troublesome, choosing to love a white child more than her own an unforgivable and heinous deed. But then the destabilization of identity is a practice quite comm on for Toni Morrison, and rightly so, because although identity is formed at an early stage in our existence, the vector of external factors leave multiple indelible marks upon the essence of our character. For Toni Morrisons characters the insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome take too great a toll on their resilience, which ultimately becomes defeated. This reciprocal allegoric relationship between private and collective (in this case racial) identity is a true-to-life representation of many generations of oppressed African-Americans and their struggles to survive in a disparaging mainstream society. In Sula, the African-American writer uses the Bottom as a twofold metaphor: on the one hand the location of this neighbourhood is on top of a hill which, as the slave owner explains to the slave, is the bottom of the world from where God is watching and from which â€Å"the blacks† took â€Å"small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks† (11), while on the other we see little black girls being picked on by the most recent immigrants who themselves would endure abuse, thus continuing this loop which is closed by the proximity to God that the hills afford them. The ramifications do not stop here: it seems that in any place in the novel, any novel of Toni Morrisons, there is a starting point for a new insight, for a new interpretation, for a kernel of postmodernist truth about life and literature, for novel literary technique and what it entails for both the novel itself as a genre, as well as for the reader and his/her perception of things thats constantly being challenged, just like the readers matrix of social tenets and belief system. Possibly the best example of this is served by the story which inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved, the story of the African-American woman who would rather kill her own daughter than suffer to have her returned to bondage. As Nellie Y. McKay, the co-editor alongside William L. Andrews of â€Å"Toni Morrisons Beloved A Casebook† states another critics point of view (i.e. Karla F. C. Holloway, writer of â€Å"Beloved: A Spiritual†), Toni Morrison really manages to come up with a fresh and reinvigorating approach   For example, with myth as a dominant feature of Beloved, Morrison not only reclaims the Garner story from those who interviewed her after her childs death and expressed enormous surprise at her calm but also, as mythmaker, achieves a complete revision of the episode. [] The oral and written history that Morrison revises, consciously and unconsciously felt, considers many aspects of each life and reflects an alternative perspective on reality. [] In addition, Morrison, like many other African and African-American writers, often defies the boundaries separating past, present, and future time. This allows her to free Beloved from the dominance of a history that would deny the merits of slave stories. As Morrisons creation, Beloved is not only Sethes dead child but the faces of all those lost in slavery, carrying in her the history of the sixty million and more. Holloway sees Beloved as a novel of inner vision: the reclamation of black spiritual histories. (15) As Morrison herself points out in the novel, the press has no interest in presenting the truth detachedly. It also does not concern itself with such â€Å"trite† topics as the abominable abuses of slavery and it does not give praise where praise is due. Instead, it engages in shameless hectoring of a mother who kills her own daughter. If taken out of context, we would expect it to do no less and, but for Toni Morrisons reframing and revamping of the story, we probably wouldnt have given the story a second thought. But we cannot be left to stand idle before such brazen hypocrisy as regarding Sethe more animal than human, and then a murderess guilty of a heinously premeditated act done whilst in full possession of her faculties. Furthermore, her case is stripped of context, just as the plethora of various other deeds similarly perpetrated as a result of extraordinary duress. This time around Morrison gives ample space to her heroine to justify her actions, while not allowing her , however, to be absolved of the guilt she must bear until the end, hence the muddled border between temporal references, actions, characters, and individualities, which again escape their expected linearity and contiguity. Perception is a fickle thing, especially when something is stretched, filtered, re-filtered, decoded and re-encoded, challenged and stereotyped and warped in every way imaginable. We cannot assert our identity as long as we are unable to find the appropriate compromise between the adoption and rejection of every aspect that is debatable and that can be transacted over this social Carrefour of exchanges. But, more importantly, we can no longer acquiesce in this moral comfort zone set out by society, which overshadows whole groups based on artificial considerations, especially when the relativism of the preceding adjective becomes too overbearing and too painful to stand. The point being made here is that while maybe artificial in essence, the segregation inflicted on these groups and others, as well (while Toni Morrison is clearly concerned with the African-American case, it cannot fail to be propitious to generalise an assertion that we should internalise already if we havent done so and apply to any case in which double standards might occur) is absorbed by those whose mental health is abused incessantly and whose resilience truly worn out and even suppressed. What Toni Morrison attempts is to sow the seeds of individual and discernible thought willing and capable enough to probe things deeper than the shallowness of their outward appearance. Toni Morrisons works are soul-wrench ing panegyrics dedicated to the memory of the former slaves and her contemporaries who were still enslaved through omission and discrimination, as well as a testimony of the noblest and most dedicated application of ones moral ideals. Chapter Two: The Importance of Family and Community in Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (nobelprize.org) It is no secret or surprise that, first family and then family and community, have the greatest impact on our personality, shaping and reshaping our existence, validating and supporting our preferences and choices or going to great lengths to lay stumbling blocks in our path towards achieving these. Furthermore, the conceptions and principles professed within familial confines are based on the patterned behaviour of ones surrounding environment. This, in turn is founded on what is deemed just and acceptable behaviour leading to harmony and cooperation and is related to civic duty. According to Freuds structural model of the psyche, the development of the human psyche is a three-stage process which corresponds to the three most important stages in our existence. In the first stage, the id, our psyche is so shaped as to want nothing but to fulfil its own needs and wishes, regardless of those of everyone else. Then, as we start learning to distinguish betwee Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Chapter One: Toni Morrisons Contribution to American Literature Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed. Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrisons lifelong work has been an accurate reflection of her and her races upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt both directly and vicariously. To be more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of whether we â€Å"read† them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself and w hose projections â€Å"fall† on the surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded is not hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs. My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together. (Rustin) Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out, especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve, resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation with mind-numbing senseless conformity . One may never tell where artistry begins and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things. If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrisons undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity, conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom. Racial Formation and Toni Morrisons Literary Manifest Racial formation never has never been and never will be (one could safely imagine) a smooth and linear phenomenon of innocuous application. Not only that, but never has there been a time in American history when race wasnt a troublesome matter, from the initial clash between the early settlers who achieved the â€Å"conquest of paradise† and the native population, through every aspect of affirmative action, to present frictions with and around immigrants and the border (i.e. with Mexico), all still wrapped in the warm blanket of the American covenant. The exodus of people crossing the ocean has always been a defining feature of the rugged American fabric and trouble and tension an inherent aftermath, for as Thomas Sowell puts it:    The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all human history. Over the years, the massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. (qtd. in Girgus 64) Even though noble rank has been outlawed by the very Constitution of the United States, this does not necessarily ensure the homogeneity of multiethnicity. The social tension described by American sociologist Thomas Sowell and quoted by Sam B. Girgus in â€Å"The New Ethnic Novel and the American Idea† is that caused by the conflicting values brought to the American land, together with languages, customs, and, more importantly, creeds and moral values that this veritable Tower of Babel is still finding very difficult to take in and transform into a meld of acceptable conformity. A tendency existed and steeply evolved in the not very long course of American history to assert the superiority of the Aryan waspish faction of the American nation over all other non-Aryan groups. Since the budding nations ideals have always been slightly adumbrated by the skulking presence of slavery, the African-American paradigm of socio-cultural and political struggle has been conferred upon speci al significance and attention. As such, the status of African-Americans has undergone severe and painful shifts, from the moment they were brought to America as slaves, until at least quite recently. These days, the life of African-Americans in the United States is undoubtedly improved, a fact which can easily be proven by the recent election of the first â€Å"black† president in the entire history of this country. Not only at the highest level, but in all walks of life evidence exists of inclusion in the earnest of members of society belonging to the African-American race.   Albeit banned on some level for instance Executive Order 8802 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned outright discrimination in the case of jobs related to the federal government and defence contractors open discrimination continued throughout the decades, the segregation and gerrymandering trailing for many decades. Several boiling pressures, however, undermined these discriminatory tactics, such as the Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. These and other actions precipitated the adoption of affirmative action, a bomb which exploded in the face of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had to make efforts to redress these social injustices through as some like to call it â€Å"positive† or â€Å"reverse† discrimination, in spite of Martin Luther King Jr.s dream, a veritable gem of rhetoric. His world-famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech is a watershed moment not only for the Civil Rights Movement a cause that i s brilliantly, persuasively and most important, peacefully championed but for every group that during the course of (American) history had been discriminated against. In it he advocates equality and fraternity, the vital prerequisites of coexistence in a sphere so decidedly multiethnic that, as Herman Melville phrases it, â€Å"You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.† (qtd. in Girgus 65). The attitude taken by American people concerning the preference for or against affirmative action is linked to what everyone was educated to believe. The factor that leaves the greatest imprint on our mind is education and the vehicles for achieving this, such as literature, films, and other media, to say nothing of standardized school curricula and society at large. It is the first of these vehicles that will be investigated in what follows, tracing Toni Morrisons efforts as an epitomic endeavour, in order to isolate its influence on our belief system, values and life choices. Significantly, an original national literature was the first mark of Americas declaration of independence from Europes influence and the African-American one the declaration of independence from â€Å"white† hegemony. Benjamin Franklin believed that â€Å"A good example is the best sermon† (qtd. in Marcovitz 55), while Emerson, the father of transcendentalism urged the American people to be self-reliant above all. Though a maverick at heart throughout his entire glorious existence which, while dappled with tragedy, his work has been no less prolific in spite of all his hardships and his originality, humour and unmatched industriousness Mark Twain, The Father of American Literature, has been a most controversial and compliant figure (only in the sense of providing such an inspiring string of examples in the sense of self-reliance) in his time and continues to be so even today. If at first his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was criticized for the language and subject matter by both his contemporaries and later admirers (Ernest Hemingway would provide a notable example) for being trite and vulgar and even excoriated by public libraries such as the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts or New Yorks Brooklyn Public Library, recent controversy has been focused around racial matters. Critics are split between those regarding the portrayal of Jim as disparaging and as a consequence offensive and those who find Jims superstitious behaviour to be an indication of an alternative perception of our bond with nature, or a more powerful connection with our spiritual side, to say nothing of the steep dissonance between the Waspish past and the politically correct present. In Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is analysed from the perspective of the importance of the Africanist presence, a presence much silenced and only timidly analyzed for decades. Discussed in terms of socio-historic development, the distinction between â€Å"black† and â€Å"white† themed by Twains novel reaches a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Toni Morrisons interpretation. This can be verified by the juxtaposition between Jims utter love for his masters and the â€Å"baroque† (Morrison 57) torture Huck and Tom subject him to. The â€Å"white† line of argumentation is brilliantly outlined in Mark Twains masterpiece and shrewdly detected by Morrison, who finds Jim â€Å"unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate†, which is exactly how the â€Å"others† are perceived. The religious, scientific, political, cultural and societal practices were so fas hioned around the time when Mark Twain lived as to legitimate slavery and abuse. Starting from the assertion that white people around Jim seek forgiveness and supplication veritable keystone concepts in Christian religions which, however, did not extend to everyone, considering the hovering doubt about the existence of the soul of the â€Å"others†, they (i.e. religions through their cloistered leaders) instead providing convenient ways for turning a blind eye on slavery and even extermination on condition that he accept his inferiority. Thus, she argues, only a representative of the African-American race could have been painfully humiliated by children after being presented as a father and an adult, while no one, not even a white convict, could have been submitted to this kind of treatment. Toni Morrisons discourse is by no means vituperative: she does not intend any reversed oppression through her writing, either in Playing in the Dark or in any of her works of fiction. However, her writing is so compelling that when Beloved does not win her the National Book Award, as many as forty-eight African-American authors and critics write to the New York Times claiming her literary prowess, which afterwards earns her the laurels of the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. Her lack of bias is evident when she praises the former President Bill Clinton calling him the â€Å"first black President, since he displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas† (Cooke), while her discursive equanimity can be traced from the way she analyses the Africanist presence in literature and the way it is regarded from the perspective of its relationship to mainstream literature and criticism: Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. (Playing in the Dark 13) While she does not wish to challenge or criticise anyone for their views and choices, Toni Morrison cannot bear to look the other way when the literary Jim Crow era is still so fiercely enforced. That it might be convenient for anyone to ignore any slice of reality or exclude any of the fibres in the fabric of a nation is quite obvious, and while this approach does not impair our intellect, it does however limit our understanding. This selective interpretation of things which leaves Africanist representation in a cone of darkness is especially significant, since it underpins racism and it bolsters its moral justification, especially along the lines of racial formation: a deeply-seated phenomenon which pervades every aspect of life in America and a very hurtful process for those slighted by it. The relevance of racial formation is underscored throughout Toni Morrisons work and, in their extensive study entitled Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Michae l Omi and Howard Winant, the two American sociologists who developed racial formation theory, argue that race is an artificial concept, because the bases according to which any particular individual can be labelled as â€Å"white†, â€Å"black†, and so on, may start from certain biological traits, but race transcends these. To illustrate the point, a person of â€Å"mixed blood† is considered from the point of view of North American and then Latin American racial identification whereby the same categorization would have the same individual first â€Å"black† and then unable to â€Å"pass† as â€Å"black†. At the other extreme, Brazilian legislation is willing to accept the assignation of several racial categories to various members of the same family. In addition to being intricate and far-reaching, these considerations help provide grounding for our study of Toni Morrisons work and its impact on American literature and even life in America and also help account for the perception of other races by the early settlers, whose religious and even scientific tenets had to be broached to accommodate these â€Å"new† categories, such as the â€Å"noble savage,† and dispute the very existence of their soul. This blatant dismissal of a persons soul based solely on the abstract and arbitrary consideration of race is an outrage that Toni Morrison starkly exposes in Beloved, about which Susanna Rustin comments the following in â€Å"The Guardian†: It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised, a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human. (Rustin) Sethe, her heroine, learns the truth and is shocked to realise that her masters, whom she is so devoted to, are taught to distinguish between her human and animal characteristics, which means, in other words, that she is but a soulless beast of burden. Thats when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And dont forget to line them up. I commenced to walk backward, didnt even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. [] Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. (Beloved 224) This episode in Sethes existence can never be erased nor her pain alleviated. The suffering she is caused is absolute and boundless. Her feelings of outrage surge like torrents in her brain and she feels utterly discombobulated. This memory will forever haunt her; it will shape her future and her attitude towards life, her behaviour towards her children, and it will serve as a constantly open wound. Whats even more tragic is that this mind-boggling injustice spared no one: men, women, or children. Remembering his own price, down to the cent, that schoolteacher was able to get for him, he wondered what Sethes would have been. What had Baby Suggs been? How much did Halle owe, still, besides his labor? What did Mrs. Garner get for Paul F? More than nine hundred dollars? How much more? Ten dollars? Twenty? Schoolteacher would know. He knew the worth of everything. It accounted for the real sorrow in his voice when he pronounced Sixo unsuitable. (266) Proceeding along these lines of dehumanization, monetary worth is assigned to each individual and that is the extent of ones value when assessed by the slave owner. Reality is raw, harsh, and beyond shocking, but sugar-coating it would not help if we are to learn the truth about racism and racial formation. The accuracy of Toni Morrisons writing in spite of the degree of fictionalization is the keystone of her discourse. It is her head-on confrontation of the underlying reality that lends Toni Morrison her uniqueness and that has earned her in equal measure respect and criticism. Despite the narrative voices that assert their own individuality in Toni Morrisons works, Sam B. Girgus comments on present-day African-American literary discourse, finding it too elaborate, and somewhat digressive to the detriment of thematic concerns such as the daily life, values, sorrows, tragedies, successes, woes, accomplishments, and so forth. He argues his point by referring to African-American writers Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: both Morrison and Gates typify qualities of ethnicity that are common to many of the writers in the literary and cultural renaissance under discussion. They all write in English even when extolling a particular vernacular speech, dialect, or region. They are all extremely sophisticated artists who use the most complex modern and postmodern techniques to convey their highly individualized visions of experience. Although rooted in ethnic communities and concrete historic situations, their works as cultural artifacts and products are nevertheless aspects of complicated technological and bureaucratic systems of cultural and social production that often differ from the language, values, and daily life of the cultures for which they speak. (Girgus 61) This may be so if we for instance pick up Toni Morrisons Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved where we find passages of stream of consciousness, dialectal dialogue, flashbacks from the past and the conflation of past and present resulting in a destabilized horizon of racial and individual formation. Toni Morrisons formal education may have driven a wedge between herself and the culture she was born into and which she proudly represents, but she still manages to put together an incredible manifesto that reaches deeper truths and meanings with absolute valences. In her novel the three heroines mother and two daughters have overlapping individualities and they represent good and evil in equal measure. Their existences are nonlinear and they run both ways along the temporal axis. This is especially true of Sethe, the mother, whose past still haunts her and impacts greatly her present and future; an impact which extends to her family as well. The state of nonlinearity, conflation, and duality is also found in other novels, such as The Bluest Eye or Sula, in which the heroines manage to become displaced from their status, they are isolated from their respective families and friends, and are forced into pursuing painful valences of individuality. From this point of view, Toni Morrison herself manages to overreach her scope by challenging the perceptions, values, mores, and principles we are ingrained with by society and education. Agnes Suranyi, a contributor to â€Å"The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison†, edited by Justine Tally, expresses just such a view: â€Å"The borderline between decent women and man-eating prostitutes is erased; only the latter are capable of giving love to Pecola, whose quest for it elsewhere is futile.† (16-17). This view is of great significance because it epitomizes Toni Morrisons take on life: nothing in her work is â€Å"fed† to us already masticated; it is quite the c ontrary that occurs: we have to interpret the facts stated, the innuendoes, the streams of consciousness, the multifaceted and split personalities, their actions and inactions all by ourselves, through our own filters and open up to a more thorough interpretation that must override dated tenets.     Ã‚   Applying the above stated, upon perusing Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, one cannot miss the connection between melding and overlapping identities and the life of people struggling with racial formation and being forced into conformity and assimilation. This assertion is further reinforced by the fact that Sethe lived in the time of the Underground Railroad, a time which saw a sharp increase in the severity of punishments for escaping bondage. The tenseness of life on the black / white divide is passed on to later generations who carry on with their incessant frictions all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond. In a 2004 interview with Rachel Cooke for â€Å"The Observer† Toni Morrison successfully proves why the battle with racism is not yet over, in spite of all the things that have changed since the beginning of affirmative action. I dont pass without insults. Let me give you an example. I walk into the Waldorf Astoria in New York to check in. Were going to have a drink, and then my friend is going to go home. She stands behind me, as I check in. Finally, the guy says, Oh, are you registering too? He thought I was the maid. My friend was trembling with anger. It was so personal. But the irony of it was that I was on the cover of a magazine that month, and there were these posters with my face on them all over New York. (qtd. in â€Å"The Observer†) The Bluest Eye her debut novel for instance, has had its popularity delayed many a year precisely because of the stark way in which Toni Morrison approached taboo subjects and because she strived to prove that â€Å"black† did not equal â€Å"ugly†. Growing up is difficult and the girls in the novel find their race assignation which is no fault of theirs a difficult burden to carry around. They do not have the easier lives of the lighter-skinned people in their community and their perceived ugliness is a feature which gradually seeps into their consciousness to such a degree that it becomes overbearing. The validity of this externally-imposed ugliness is reinforced not only by the white members of society, but by the very families themselves. In Pecolas case, her own mother finds her daughter repulsive and troublesome, choosing to love a white child more than her own an unforgivable and heinous deed. But then the destabilization of identity is a practice quite comm on for Toni Morrison, and rightly so, because although identity is formed at an early stage in our existence, the vector of external factors leave multiple indelible marks upon the essence of our character. For Toni Morrisons characters the insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome take too great a toll on their resilience, which ultimately becomes defeated. This reciprocal allegoric relationship between private and collective (in this case racial) identity is a true-to-life representation of many generations of oppressed African-Americans and their struggles to survive in a disparaging mainstream society. In Sula, the African-American writer uses the Bottom as a twofold metaphor: on the one hand the location of this neighbourhood is on top of a hill which, as the slave owner explains to the slave, is the bottom of the world from where God is watching and from which â€Å"the blacks† took â€Å"small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks† (11), while on the other we see little black girls being picked on by the most recent immigrants who themselves would endure abuse, thus continuing this loop which is closed by the proximity to God that the hills afford them. The ramifications do not stop here: it seems that in any place in the novel, any novel of Toni Morrisons, there is a starting point for a new insight, for a new interpretation, for a kernel of postmodernist truth about life and literature, for novel literary technique and what it entails for both the novel itself as a genre, as well as for the reader and his/her perception of things thats constantly being challenged, just like the readers matrix of social tenets and belief system. Possibly the best example of this is served by the story which inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved, the story of the African-American woman who would rather kill her own daughter than suffer to have her returned to bondage. As Nellie Y. McKay, the co-editor alongside William L. Andrews of â€Å"Toni Morrisons Beloved A Casebook† states another critics point of view (i.e. Karla F. C. Holloway, writer of â€Å"Beloved: A Spiritual†), Toni Morrison really manages to come up with a fresh and reinvigorating approach   For example, with myth as a dominant feature of Beloved, Morrison not only reclaims the Garner story from those who interviewed her after her childs death and expressed enormous surprise at her calm but also, as mythmaker, achieves a complete revision of the episode. [] The oral and written history that Morrison revises, consciously and unconsciously felt, considers many aspects of each life and reflects an alternative perspective on reality. [] In addition, Morrison, like many other African and African-American writers, often defies the boundaries separating past, present, and future time. This allows her to free Beloved from the dominance of a history that would deny the merits of slave stories. As Morrisons creation, Beloved is not only Sethes dead child but the faces of all those lost in slavery, carrying in her the history of the sixty million and more. Holloway sees Beloved as a novel of inner vision: the reclamation of black spiritual histories. (15) As Morrison herself points out in the novel, the press has no interest in presenting the truth detachedly. It also does not concern itself with such â€Å"trite† topics as the abominable abuses of slavery and it does not give praise where praise is due. Instead, it engages in shameless hectoring of a mother who kills her own daughter. If taken out of context, we would expect it to do no less and, but for Toni Morrisons reframing and revamping of the story, we probably wouldnt have given the story a second thought. But we cannot be left to stand idle before such brazen hypocrisy as regarding Sethe more animal than human, and then a murderess guilty of a heinously premeditated act done whilst in full possession of her faculties. Furthermore, her case is stripped of context, just as the plethora of various other deeds similarly perpetrated as a result of extraordinary duress. This time around Morrison gives ample space to her heroine to justify her actions, while not allowing her , however, to be absolved of the guilt she must bear until the end, hence the muddled border between temporal references, actions, characters, and individualities, which again escape their expected linearity and contiguity. Perception is a fickle thing, especially when something is stretched, filtered, re-filtered, decoded and re-encoded, challenged and stereotyped and warped in every way imaginable. We cannot assert our identity as long as we are unable to find the appropriate compromise between the adoption and rejection of every aspect that is debatable and that can be transacted over this social Carrefour of exchanges. But, more importantly, we can no longer acquiesce in this moral comfort zone set out by society, which overshadows whole groups based on artificial considerations, especially when the relativism of the preceding adjective becomes too overbearing and too painful to stand. The point being made here is that while maybe artificial in essence, the segregation inflicted on these groups and others, as well (while Toni Morrison is clearly concerned with the African-American case, it cannot fail to be propitious to generalise an assertion that we should internalise already if we havent done so and apply to any case in which double standards might occur) is absorbed by those whose mental health is abused incessantly and whose resilience truly worn out and even suppressed. What Toni Morrison attempts is to sow the seeds of individual and discernible thought willing and capable enough to probe things deeper than the shallowness of their outward appearance. Toni Morrisons works are soul-wrench ing panegyrics dedicated to the memory of the former slaves and her contemporaries who were still enslaved through omission and discrimination, as well as a testimony of the noblest and most dedicated application of ones moral ideals. Chapter Two: The Importance of Family and Community in Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (nobelprize.org) It is no secret or surprise that, first family and then family and community, have the greatest impact on our personality, shaping and reshaping our existence, validating and supporting our preferences and choices or going to great lengths to lay stumbling blocks in our path towards achieving these. Furthermore, the conceptions and principles professed within familial confines are based on the patterned behaviour of ones surrounding environment. This, in turn is founded on what is deemed just and acceptable behaviour leading to harmony and cooperation and is related to civic duty. According to Freuds structural model of the psyche, the development of the human psyche is a three-stage process which corresponds to the three most important stages in our existence. In the first stage, the id, our psyche is so shaped as to want nothing but to fulfil its own needs and wishes, regardless of those of everyone else. Then, as we start learning to distinguish betwee

Culture Schock Essay -- essays research papers

Culture in ancient times was defined as â€Å"the sum total of the equipment of the human individual, which enables him to be attuned to his immediate environment on the historical past on the other†. It reflects in effect what humans have added to Nature. It comprises the spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of a society and includes, in addition to the arts and letters, the value systems, traditions, modes of life and beliefs of the society. It also absorbs from other cultures and undergoes changes with time, sometimes beneficial, sometimes regressive. (Barlas, 15). Culture shock is a severe psychological reaction that results from adjusting to the realities of a society radically different from one’s own. The actual degree of culture shock may vary depending on the differences and similarities between the society studied and the persons’ own society. The symptoms may range from mild irritation to surprise or disgust. (Scupin, 124). Usually after the person experiencing culture shock learns the norms, beliefs, and practices of the community, the psychological disorientation of culture shock begins to diminish. This paper will be based upon culture shock and international business. There are three areas where culture shock could affect you: 1. Emotions-you have to cope with the stress of international work and keeping an emotional balance in order to perform in a business. 2. Thinking style- you have to understand how your counterparts think and be able to develop culturally effective solutions. 3. Social skills and social identity- you need effective social skills to establish new business relationships. (Marx, 25). This differs from manager to manager, some managers seem to adapt in an almost chameleon –like way to different countries, whereas others cling desperately to their habits and their national approaches. Working in a new culture can produce a variety of reactions, such as;  · Confusion about what to do  · Anxiety  · Frustration  · Exhilaration  · Inappropriate social behavior  · Inability to get close to your business partner and clinch the deal  · Feeling isolated  · Becoming depressed All of the above are possible reactions to culture shock, the shock we experience when we are confronted with the unknown the â€Å"foreign†. The term culture shock was coined by the anthropologists Oberg, who explained both the symptoms and the process o... ...location. It is as likely to occur in a country near your home base as in posting further afield.  · As soon as you arrive in your new location, identify all the opportunities for building support networks with other international managers and local people.  · As with any stressful situation, fight it, don’t give in to it. So don’t resort to escapist strategies such as drinking or eating too much and don’t deny your symptoms.  · Ask other international managers for guidance on the issues and problems to look out for. Learn from their experience  · Give yourself time to adapt and don’t rush into too many work-related projects as the start of the assignment. Make sure that the organization gives you this time too.  · Don’t hesitate to seek professional help of symptoms persist despite your coping effort. Help may be available within your company or externally through counselors or the medical profession.  · Expect the same symptoms to reoccur when you come home. Reverse culture shock is normal.  · Think about the positive aspects of culture shock-people who experience it adapt better to their new environment than those who do not.  · Retain a sense of humor! (Marx, 18). Word Count: 1199