| Abstrakt: |
The article focuses on the representation of whiteness and blackness in the imagery of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). Many of The Woman Warrior images present whiteness side by side with blackness. Rather than perceive the juxtaposition of whiteness and blackness as a mere coincidence, it can be seen as an extension of Kingston's commentary on racial relations in the United States, a constituent element of a meticulously constructed design, an attempt to "transform aspects of [one's] social grounding into aspects of language" (Morrison, Playing in the Dark 4). The juxtaposition of whiteness with blackness reveals what can be termed as a dyadic quality of whiteness, that is, the socio-historical dependence of whiteness for its construction on non-white racial categories. Whites often position themselves in the center, defining themselves in relation to the people, whom they place in the margins. Beyond rendering the dyadic quality of whiteness, the black-white imagery of The Woman Warrior may also be perceived as an illustration of the black-white binary persisting in the United States racial relations at the time when Maxine Hong Kingston wrote and published her work. While opting for a particularist, socio-historical explanation of black-white imagery in The Woman Warrior, I still want to acknowledge an explication that would be grounded in the archetypal theory of color perception. I also cite the traditional color theory identifying both black and white as achromatic colors. The most striking image of blackness juxtaposed with whiteness that comes to the foreground in the narrative and receives special attention in the article is the image of the narrator's childhood paintings during the three years of her most profound silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
