The Idealization and Self-Identification of Black Characters in the Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison: Using Voyant Text Analysis Tools

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison discusses about the life of an African American women in the early periods of the twentieth century, who were greatly influenced by the standards of beauty at that period. According to Olson (54), these women lived in a society which was full of prejudice and many other forms of injustices, and the females suffered from both sexism and racism. It is noted that the black women were treated based on the colour of their skin and eyes, instead of being judged based on their intentions and deeds.  Toni Morrison deeply explores how the blacks suffered from racism and explain the impact the racist’s view of beauty in relation to the whiteness on the construction of one’s identity and self-hatred.  The main character presented in this story is Pecola, who is used to show some of the worst effects of double marginalization and racism. It is a fact that what she perceives as her ugliness as the main reason why she is mistreated by the people around her.  According to Koopman (305) it hurts to be rejected and so she becomes so pessimistic to a point where she started to hate her real identity, which she perceived as being different for that she wishes to possess. This change is the perception of her self-identity can only be as a result of the abnormal perception of women during that period.  This paper will analyze Toni Morrison’s book, The Bluest Eye to reveal the idealization and realization of self of a black character, specifically, Pecola. This study will make use of the Voyant tool to analyze the text and find the most common words in the text and their relationships.  The paper concluded that beauty, which as observed is not normally based on a person’s appearance, has become the new standard for accepting people. The central character, Pecola, believes that it is only through the blue-eyed girl that a person can be trusted and accepted by others. It is further revealed that Morrison’s main focus was to put an accent on the importance of self –identification and acceptance. Keywords: The idealization, self-identification, Voyant

Shadism and Female Resistance in Toni Morrison's Novels

The experiences of African Americans provide an understanding of issues such as racism, shadism, gender, class, and discrimination. This study provides new insight on shadism and the resistance of female by focusing on the positive and negative outcomes and their causes in four novels by the esteemed African American novelist Toni Morrison. These novels are Paradise, Beloved, A Mercy, and The Bluest Eye. The study analyzes these novels with the ultimate aim of examining concepts of shadism and female's resistance within the African American community. The analysis indicates that slavery had a profound effect on the way that African Americans related to each other. In particular, the preferences provided to light-skinned Americans created hatred between African Americans which led to the rise of shadism. This is manifested in Toni Morrison Paradise, where the concept of disallowing light-skinned blacks the opportunity to maintain the purity of their race and create an indigenous place is raised. Further, it was found that shadism created substantial trauma for African Americans, which manifested differently in the novels. In Beloved, there are instances where characters kill their children as a way of saving them from the evils of slavery and it is revealed that the acts of shadism contribute to healing as the characters have to confront their past individually and collectively throughout traumatic and narrative memory, embodied memory, and cultural memory. Further, solidarity and sisterhood can be viewed as a way of overcoming and preventing oppression like the women in A Mercy reveal, despite differences in origin, background, and belief. Also, in The Bluest Eye, the study demonstrates that shadism is not only related to race, but to the manner in which one or more constructed identities influence it through the lens of intersectionality; this happened mostly when a character tries to mimic or try to pass racially to white. Significantly, the study finds that the issue of whiteness and American identity are tools utilized to amplify discrimination against African Americans. Thus, shadism adopts the same ideological position as racism and increases inequalities in the African American community. Dealing with the issue of shadism requires focusing on changing people’s beliefs about race, whiteness, American identity, and class. Thus, changing misconceptions about race will play an important role in creating better, and more tolerant, communities

Book Review: Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: on the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory by Lars Eckstein (2006)

Eckstein (2006) notes that the Atlantic slave trade has continuously haunted the cultural memories of Europe, Africa, and America.  In fact, everyone wishes to forget about it.  Many of the victims of the African origin tried to run away from the sites that they got traumatized, while those who were enlightened especially, the Westerners preferred to remain unconscious to these upsetting complicity between slavery and enlightenment. In the last few years, many fiction writers have made a decision to venture in re-membering the Black Atlantic. &nbsp

Gender Identity in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

In this paper, I am going to conduct a feminist reading of Tar Baby by using feminist theory. We are going to look at the issues of gender identity according to feminist’s ideologies and principles in term of oppression against black in general and black women specifically. In addition to that, we are going to use one of the main principles of feminism, which is the patriarchy system between gender and origin. This analysis based on the actions, thoughts and behaviors of the major characters in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby to gain their identity, also to understand the nature of gender inequality and examining women's social roles, experience and interests

Approche générique pour l'extraction de relations à partir de textes

International audienceCet article s'intéresse à l'extraction de relations dans le contexte du web sémantique, en vue de procéder à de la construction d'ontologies aussi bien qu'à de l'annotation automatique de documents. Notre approche permet l'extraction de relations entre entités à partir de textes. Elle ne fait pas d'hypothèse sur les entités, de manière à la rendre aussi générique que possible, et à autoriser par exemple l'extraction de relations entre concepts aussi bien que l'extraction de relations entre instances de concepts. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous nous fondons sur l'algorithme LP2. Afin d'adapter cet algorithme à l'extraction de relations, nous proposons une nouvelle notion de contexte reposant sur un graphe de dépendances, généré par un analyseur syntaxique. Un tel graphe de dépendances est bien adapté à la représentation de relations, puisqu'il permet, notamment, de repérer aisément les différents arguments d'un verbe dans une phrase. Nous présentons l'implémentation réalisée suivie d'une première phase d'expérimentations

Analysis for inter turn stator fault with load variation in Induction Motor

This paper investigates the impact of load variation on the diagnosis of inter-turn stator faults in induction machines. The proposed detection technique relies on the analysis of stator current using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in both normal and faulty states of the machine. The energy of the approximation and detail signals obtained from DWT provides valuable information about the machine's health and the severity of the inter-turn stator faults. Experimental tests were conducted using a dSpace 1104 signal card-based interface to study the load effects in detecting and diagnosing stator inter-turn short circuit faults in induction motor

Modeling renewable energy production and CO2 emissions in the region of Adrar in Algeria using LSTM neural networks

This paper addresses the slow-onset crisis of global warming caused by CO2 emissions. Although electrical load is a major influence in a country’s growth and development, it is also one of largest sources of greenhouse gases (GHG), CO2 in particular. Therefore, switching to cleaner energy sources is a clear objective and forecasting electricity load and its environmental cost is a necessary task for electrical energy planning and management. This paper addresses short-term load forecasting of renewable energy (RE) production in the region of Adrar in Algeria with Adrar’s photovoltaic (PV) farm and Kabertene’s wind farm. The forecast is compared to the overall load demand, and the reduced amount of CO2 resulting from using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels is calculated. The forecasting models are Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, which were trained and validated using real data provided by the national state-owned company SONALGAZ. The results show good performance for the forecasting models with PV and wind models achieving a Mean-absolute-error (MAE) of 0.024 and 0.1 respectively, and that RE can help reduce CO2 emissions by up to 25% per hour

Combustion characteristics of lean premixed methane/higher hydrocarbon/hydrogen flames

Declining indigenous resources, increased dependence on imports and intermittent renewable energy, have resulted in an increasingly diverse energy-generation landscape. As a result, gas turbine operators face new challenges with respect to gas turbine flexibility in terms of combustion efficiency, safety and emission control. Increased reliance on liquefied natural gas, potentially containing high concentrations of heavier hydrocarbons, typically ethane and propane, coupled with the emerging prospect of hydrogen injection into national gas grids, presents associated combustion impacts not fully appreciated. This new reality underlines the necessity of developing understanding of fundamental combustion characteristics, ultimately guiding the design of future highly flexible gas turbines. This thesis aims to characterise fundamental combustion performance of methane/higher hydrocarbon/hydrogen fuels, through a combination of experimental and numerical techniques, with a focus on natural gas blends representative of fuel variations and at air fuel ratios expected in premixed low-carbon power generation facilities. The parameters identified to investigate fuel behaviour were the laminar burning velocity, Markstein Length and the Lewis Number, yielding essential physiochemical and thermo-diffusive flame information. These properties are of value when attempting to predict flame behaviour in turbulent environments, reflective of most practical gas turbine applications. The main components of natural gas, and relevant hydrogen enriched binary and tertiary mixtures were parametrically investigated, with respect to stretch-related and flame propagation behaviour at lean air fuel ratios, in addition to a comparison of numerically simulated results obtained from chemical kinetics. Effective Lewis Number models were appraised and compared to experimentally measured data, employing theoretical formulations relating Markstein Length to Lewis Number as proposed in literature. The influence of hydrogen and propane addition to the lean stability limits of premixed turbulent methane flames was examined, using a generic swirl burner, at various inlet temperature and thermal powers, with measured lean blow off limits in correlation with measured Markstein length behaviour

Surface Roughness Enhances Self-Nucleation of High-Density Polyethylene Droplets Dispersed within Immiscible Blends

[EN] Highly linear or high-density polyethylenes (HDPEs) have an intrinsically high nucleation density compared to other polyolefins. Enhancing their nucleation density by self-nucleation is therefore difficult, leading to a narrow self-nucleation Domain (i.e., the so-called Domain II or the temperature Domain where self-nuclei can be injected into the material without the occurrence of annealing). In this work, we report that when HDPE is blended (up to 50%) with immiscible matrices, such as atactic polystyrene (PS) or Nylon 6, its self-nucleation capacity can be greatly increased. In addition, temperatures higher than the equilibrium melting temperature of the HDPE phase are needed to erase the significantly enhanced crystalline memory in the blends. Morphological evidence gathered by Scanning and Transmission Electron Microscopies (SEM and TEM) indicates that these unexpected results can be explained by the modification of the interface between blend components. The filling of the solid HDPE surface asperities by the low viscosity polystyrene during heating to the self-nucleation temperature, or the crystallization of the matrix in the case of Nylon 6, enhances the interface roughness between the two polymers in the blends. Such rougher interfaces can remarkably increase the self-nucleation capacity of the HDPE phase via surface nucleation.The authors acknowledge technical and human support provided by SGIker (UPV/EHU/ERDF, EU). This work has also received funding from the Basque Government through grant IT1309-19