Toni Morrison

The bulk of what we know as violence is myth. Since myths have been told and retold over the years, they have been taken as truth. This paper explores racial myths as representations of verbal violence in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. Toni Morrison as an African-American identity explorer dwells on the slogans and myths as manifestations of Žižekian symbolic violence. Methodologically, this study uses political discourse analysis, black gendered feminism and psychoanalysis in the light of Slavoj Žižek's commentary on violence to be the approaches of analyzing the drawn data. The fusion of psychoanalytic terms with political ones sheds a fresh light on the concepts of ideology and violence. This paper aims at exploring the mechanisms of the black violence myth that spread the racial beliefs that Africans are more violence prone and have higher pain tolerance than Europeans. The conclusion extracted from this study confirms that the discourse of the myths functions as pseudo-ideologies to normalize the violence against non-European races and stop the African subalterns' resistance in the form of fighting back against the raids of the Europeans.

Anti-racism novels, portraying racism in all areas of wealth and income, education, health care, civil rights, life in North America and apartheid in South Africa, can create awareness toward different kinds of oppression that people suffered during different periods. The purpose of this study is to present a thematic analysis of Persian translations of Morrison’s Beloved (1987) from English between 1978 and 2005/ 1357 and 1384 by Gulrukh Sa’īdnīyā, Sānāz Sihatī, and Shīrīndukht Daghīghīān applying the theory of the structure of feeling by Williams (1983). In order to do this study, sentimental scenes of Beloved, examining the destructive legacy of slavery, which were translated during the period under study were examined. Persian translations of these scenes were identified, and the representations of the feelings in the identified scenes were analyzed based on the theory of the structure of feeling by Williams (1983). Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the three translators seemed to be able to transfer the representations of the identified sentimental scenes, such as fury and resentment into Persian. Furthermore, the findings suggest that translation of anti-racism novels plays a significant role in transferring representation of feelings of oppressed people into other nations.