Jazz aesthetic form in Toni Morrisons "Jazz"

Scientific Essay from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Literature, University of Nottingham (School of Canadian and American Studies), course: American Studies, language: English, abstract: This text attempts to explore Toni Morrisons strategic negotiation between essentialism and anti-essentialism in regard to the re-appropriation of African American musical aesthetics in fiction. The text also tries to examine how Morrisons dual-stance positioning demonstrates the conscious strategy of achieving the double goal of recovering African American and female voices as well as of critiquing hegemonic cultural logics about race and gender. To this end, I draw on some critics and musicians representing contending views regarding the cultural origins of jazz to argue how Morrison employs the music as a concurrent aesthetic/cultural metaphor for blackness and for American diversity through the re-appropriation of jazz characteristics in Jazz. As a whole, the text considers that the motivations behind Morrisons accommodation of the two stances in her fiction are related to her strategic positioning that offers fruitful possibilities for mediating affirmations of difference and the necessity of racial, gender and cultural group politics.