African Diasporic Consciousness in the 21st Century - Term Paper Example

The conception of tradition has always been fundamental to Toni Morrison’s fiction. Although most of her novels provide a different way of understanding the significance of memory, history, and the heritage of African Americans, Tar Baby provides maybe the most stimulating and complicated arbitration on the meaning of the tradition. Next, the novel reaches no straightforward winding up. It rather avoids the simplicities of Afro-centrism studies by navigating the anti-fundamentalist basis of black Atlantic studies.

Furthermore, the novel has deeply ambivalent connections between diaspora, gender, and nationalism. Although the novel greatly concentrates on gender and class, this paper will focus on the novel’s arguments about diaspora and nationalism. In the novel, conflicts come out in more multifaceted and unmanageable ways, thereby multiplying in the process all the strangeness that makes diaspora an inspiring perception today. In its explication of diaspora, the novel’s narrative structure displays two distinct nonspecific efforts, those of realism and myth, which could be pegged on ideological disputes about the meaning of diaspora.

The initial stress starts the novel in the fictional background of Isle des Chevaliers, a Caribbean island shown in a mythic approach. In this approach, Morrison produces a sense of attentive nature that is itself the depository of any idea of tradition, permanence, or opposition that African Americans might require today. In the book, the author intentionally presents this approach as externally related to modernity and rationality. The book brilliantly integrates this approach to specifically accumulate a sense of diasporic presence that survives beyond the facts of time and space.

Connected to nature and powerful in its tradition, this conception of diaspora provides a means of rebuking the customs of white culture and is particularly allied with the history of the resistance to slavery. For this case, African American culture is clearly genuine, eternal, and confident. This display of tradition is in tension with a second approach which utilizes realism to entrench a comprehension of diasporic encounters as fraught with divergence. Utilized principally for the action set against the backdrop of cities, Paris and New York, the realist approach is detonated by Jadine, an archetypal city girl, who is self-dependant and tolerant but also egotistic, self-seeking, and, above all, insensitive.

Although characterized basically by snappy dialogues as opposed to blossoming evocations of eternal nature, this approach works well against the backdrop of a diaspora that is fraught with manifold diasporic encounters. As a result, these diasporic encounters display only mistrust, injustice, and confusion. By and large, this approach also displays the errant skepticisms about the significance of convention, specifically in its connection to gender issues, and provides optional ways of discussing the contemporary world.

Needless to say, the strain between these two discrepant approaches provides numerous insights about the diasporic culture and modernity. Morrison displays that race really matters by stressing the misconceptions between Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean characters. Accordingly, any fundamentalist definition of race is consequently destabilized through the chain of implications that consists of black identity. Furthermore, in comparison with the male subject understood by a majority of theorists of the diaspora, Toni Morrison jumbles the traditional ascriptions of gender with Jadine representing mobility.

Although many cultural nationalist