THE ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY IN TONI MORRISON'S NOVELS

This article examines the artistic interpretation of African American identity in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. A qualitative textual method is used to analyze the role of racial standards, memory, gender, family history, community, and cultural inheritance. The findings show that Morrison presents identity not as a fixed personal quality but as a process formed through conflict between external judgment and internal cultural knowledge. Her multiple narrators, fragmented chronology, symbolism, oral traditions, and supernatural elements give artistic form to experiences often excluded from official history. The article concludes that Morrison’s fiction transforms African American identity from an imposed racial category into a complex consciousness based on memory, relation, resistance, and cultural continuity.