Complete 7 pages APA formatted article: Postcolonialism Oppresion in Morrison's Tar Baby.

Complete 7 pages APA formatted article: Postcolonialism Oppresion in Morrison's Tar Baby. Morrison’s Tar Baby shows, however, that laws are not enough to end postcolonial social conflicts. The novel’s setting is the 1970s and intersected the Caribbean, New York City, and Florida. Jadine “Jade” Childs met Son, an uneducated African American man. Their lives intertwined and clashed, until their final divergence, where both Son and Jade challenged the social institutions that curtailed their individualistic interests. This paper takes a sociological approach in analyzing the novel. Tar Baby demonstrates that postcolonialism is more or less like colonialism with pervading traditional racial and gender attitudes, although several blacks, such as the Childs, have developed an acute sense of self-importance and independence. Social structures changed since postcolonial times, but also remained poisoned with racism and sexism, while new forms of social conflicts attacked individualist yearnings. The novel establishes class structures, where racial lines divide the upper white class from the black working class, while the blacks are further divided between those who relish the past and wanted to hold on to it and those who commanded new power even over lower social class blacks. Grewal analyzes the social conflicts in Tar Baby. He stresses: “…Tar Baby depicts the struggle over cultural definitions and identifications in a postmodern world” (204).