Agentic Things and Traumatized People in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, when seen from the perspective of “thing theory” and other new materialist discourses, challenges the dominant anthropocentric mode of relationship between humans and things. In the novel, ostensibly inanimate things exert their agencies over the survival, less physical than spiritual, of socially oppressed African Americans. Morrison complicates “thing theory” and extremist new materialist thinking by initiating the development of an eclectic new materialism, which foregrounds the vibrancy of quotidian objects while also integrating it into human agency through the co-habitation of space, thus creating a harmonious and balanced network of hybrid agencies that can be both troubling and stabilizing.