ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Toni Morrison employs white standards of beauty as modern iterations of the errand, beset upon an African American community in Ohio in order to civilize and assimilate them into the dominant white culture in The Bluest Eye. This chapter charts the exclusionary cartographies of the dominant ideology that may be traced about the racialized and gendered geo-ontologies of the novel’s cast of characters. The chapter places the psycho-spatial cartography of racial exclusion against concomitant sites of environmental disruption and ruins to locate where and how they viscerally cohere for black women (and their bodies) in the novel.
