Wallace Thurman’s “Pyrrhic Victory”: The Search for a Place in the Social Dimension and the Reiteration of the Colonial System of Oppression in The Blacker the Berry

Since its 1929 publication, Wallace Thurman’s novel The Blacker the Berry has been interpreted as a revolutionary work that, denouncing the oppression of black women’s bodies and sexualities, highlighted the untruthfulness of perceiving the African American community as cohesive and supportive. Recognizing that the critical attention stirred by the novel has almost uniquely been related to the issue of colorism, this paper analyzes the process of marginalization suffered by Thurman’s protagonist and attempts to interpret the “Pyrrhic Victory” at the end of the novel as a process of colonization that pits oppressed black, queer, and disabled bodies against each other. Despite the various attempts to overcome her marginalization, Thurman’s protagonist, in fact, ultimately must recognize that the alternative to carve a “place in the world for a girl as black as she” (Thurman 2018, 27) is to accept and propound the same colonial practices that had caused her own social marginalization on other bodies along another dimension.