SOURCE: Awkward, Michael. “Roadblocks and Relatives: Critical Revision in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay, pp. 57-68. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988.

In the following essay, Awkward considers the ways Morrison has incorporated and manipulated the works of earlier African American writers in The Bluest Eye in order to express and validate specific types of African American female experiences whose cultural significance those texts often deny.

In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Toni Morrison insists that ancestors play an essential role in individual works in the Afro-American canon. She states:

It seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of the ancestor. Which is to say a grandfather as in Ralph Ellison, or a grandmother as in Toni Cade Bambara, or a healer as in Bambara or Henry Dumas. There...