Shopping for an I : Consumer identities in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Abstract: This thesis investigates to role consumerism plays when young, black, underclass characters try to build their identities in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017). Through implementing intersectional analysis and postcolonial theory this essay discusses how social positions are read and understood in a mass culture that heavily favours the visual. In this culture we are all judged by our appearance and I will argue that for the poor, black, female characters in the novels, that means being the underdogs of consumer culture. Although the two novels are published half a century apart, both relate to consumer culture and how it affects the African-American community. In addition, each of the novels are produced during a wave of black uprising and strong civil rights movements. In Morrison’s novel the characters are left longing for the looks and lifestyle of white Americans, emphasising the need of the social movement’s claim ‘Black is Beautiful’. In Thomas’ novel there are a multitude of consumer objects that are coded black, such as Jordan sneakers and hip hop-music. Yet, the police shooting of young Khalil cannot be avoided by the success ‘Black is Beautiful’ brought in terms of commercialising blackness. The shooting instead brings attention to 2017’s great campaign ‘Black Lives Matter’. What is similar in both novels is that the characters, who find themselves othered in Western discourse, strive to become someone recognised as a subject, a Self. In the quest to move beyond the stereotypes ascribed to them, almost all the characters long for goods that signal their social position as someone who has succeeded, living the American Dream. Yet, in Morrison’s novel there is a critique against capitalism and consumerism, an idea that you cannot consume a subject position in a racist society. That kind of critique against capitalism is absent in Thomas’ novel.