Dramatizing Trauma in Resistance to Post-Colonial Hegemonic Culture : a Magic(Al) Realist Reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved
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University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-2015 Dramatizing trauma in resistance to post-colonial hegemonic culture : a magic(al) realist reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Love and Frida Kahlo's selected paintings. FENG Yi, University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Yi,, FENG, "Dramatizing trauma in resistance to post-colonial hegemonic culture : a magic(al) realist reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Love and Frida Kahlo's selected paintings." (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2241. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2241 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The nivU ersity of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The nivU ersity of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DRAMATIZING TRAUMA IN RESISTANCE TO POST-COLONIAL HEGEMONIC CULTURE: A MAGIC(AL) REALIST READING OF TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED, LOVE AND FRIDA KAHLO’S SELECTED PAINTINGS By FENG Yi B.A., Heilongjiang University, 2003 M.A., Beijing Foreign Studies University, 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities Department of Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky August 2015 Copyright@2015 by FENG Yi All rights reserved DRAMATIZING TRAUMA IN RESISTANCE TO POST-COLONIAL HEGEMONIC CULTURE: A MAGIC(AL) REALIST READING OF TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED, LOVE AND FRIDA KAHLO’S SELECTED PAINTINGS By FENG Yi B.A., Heilongjiang University, 2003 M.A., Beijing Foreign Studies University, 2006 A Dissertation Approved on August 7, 2015 By the following Dissertation Committee: _________________________ Dissertation Director: Annette Allen _________________________ Osborne Wiggins _________________________ David Ross Anderson _________________________ Mary Makris ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather FENG Ruitian, my parents FENG Shaowu, TIAN Shulian, my husband JI Anqi and my daughter JI Ruiling with love. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my director, Dr. Annette Allen, for her constructive comments and constant support throughout this work. She was always there to talk about my works and to give advice. Additionally, her thorough and meticulous editing of this dissertation was most appreciated. I wish to express my warm and sincere thanks to Dr. Osborne P. Wiggins, Prof. David Ross Anderson, Prof. Christopher Fulton and Prof. Mary Makris for their support and guidance over the past several years, and their willingness to participate in my dissertation. I would also like to thank our Graduate School, who generously approved my extensions when I met difficulties in my life. Thanks are also due to other professors in this PhD program, Prof. Elaine O. Wise, Prof. St. Claire, Dr. Pamela Beattie, Dr. CHEN Guohua, Dr. ZHANG Jian, Dr. JIN Li, Dr. SUN Youzhong, Dr. WU Yi’an, and Dr. ZHANG Zaixin, whose inspiring teaching opened my eyes. I am also greatly indebted to Dr. SUN Xiujie, whohelped to make this PhD program possible and offered a lot of timely help to us and to me specially. Without her consistent support to me, the completion of my study may fail. Additionally, I am very grateful to the friendship of all of the members of this PhD program, I warmly iv thank MA Qin, SONG Nan and LIN Wenshuang, for their friendly help. I also want to thank Lisa Schonburg and Courtney Kerr, who helped me with all the problems in my study. Special thanks to XU Jingping, ZHOU Liu and Pinkney Wiggins, whose emotional support, camaraderie, entertainment a caring helped me get through the difficult time when I did my research in Louisville, the United States, from 2008 to 2009. I am forever indebted to my parents, FENG Shaowu and TIAN Shulian, for giving me life in the first place, for educating me with aspects from both arts and sciences, for their endless patience and unconditional support and encouragement when it was most required. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my parents-in-law, JI Qunwei and LIU Chuanfang, for taking care of my daughter and everyone in the family when I have to stay in the office to work with my dissertation late in the evening and during weekends. I owe my loving thanks to my husband, JI Anqi, for unwavering love, support and understanding during the many hours I dedicated to achieving this milestone in my life and career; and to my lovely daughter JI Ruiling, for allowing mommy to leave her temporarily to pursue her interests. v ABSTRACT DRAMATIZING TRAUMA IN RESISTANCE TO POST-COLONIAL HEGEMONIC CULTURE: A MAGIC(AL) REALIST READING OF TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED,LOVE AND FRIDA KAHLO’S SELECTED PAINTINGS FENG Yi August 7, 2015 The purpose of this cross-disciplinary dissertation is to explore how magic(al) realist techniques are applied in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Love and Frida Kahlo’s selected paintings to dramatize the traumas experienced in post-colonial period, and how the artists resist the cultural hegemony through their art works. From the magic(al) realist and Gramscian point of view, the dissertation focuses on 1) the similar situations and cultural hegemony of African Americans and Frida Kahlo had experienced; 2) why and how Toni Morrison and Frida Kahlo chose and used magic(al) realist techniques in their art works to dramatize the traumas; and 3) how vi Toni Morrison and Frida Kahlo resist the cultural hegemony by applying magic(al) realist techniques in their art works. The results show that in the post-colonial period, African Americans and Frida Kahlo were influenced by the hegemonic culture and the traumas they experienced were caused by colonization and cultural hegemony. Toni Morrison and Frida Kahlo aimed at arousing the awareness of the marginalized people in such situation. Therefore, both of the outstanding artists applied magic(al) realist techniques in Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved and Love and Frida Kahlo’s selected paintings to exaggerate the physical and psychological traumas that African Americans and Frida Kahlo had gone through. In Beloved and Love, Toni Morrison dealt with traumas took place on African American women caused by colonialism and Euro-American hegemonic culture. In order to depict the pain to the most, Toni Morrison blended the boundary between the practical world and magical world, to make it possible to the readers to share the sufferings that African American women went through in the colonial and post-colonial period. Toni Morrison did not stop at depicting the traumas, she in fact used magic(al) techniques to bring the dead back to the world to dramatize the traumas and focused on the causes for these traumas, that was, the hegemonic culture in colonialism and pot-colonialism. By writing the novels with these techniques, Toni Morrison resisted the post-colonial hegemonic culture. Not like Toni Morrison, who described collective traumas of African Americans; vii Frida Kahlo portrayed her own physical and psychological traumas by applying magic(al) realist techniques in her selected paintings. She integrated Mexican indigenous cultural heritage and pre-Columbian images in her paintings to resist the influence from the hegemonic culture. She rejected standard western concept of beauty in paintings by combining magical objects with objects in real world. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION .................................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1 Social and Cultural Background ............................................................................................... 2 Background information on Magic(al) Realism ................................................................ 3 Background information on Post-colonialism ................................................................... 8 Hegemony in both Post-Colonialism and Post-Marxism ................................................ 17 Background information on Trauma ............................................................................... 23 Research Purposes and Research Questions ........................................................................... 25 Literature review ..................................................................................................................... 29 About the Present Study .......................................................................................................... 34 Magic(al) Realism ..........................................................................................................