Recreation of History to Regain Cultural Pattern inToni Morrison'sJazz

Abstract

This work has tried to reveal how expressive arts like blue music or jazz have functioned as a mode and institution of intervention and, therefore, as a blue print and recourse, re–position, and re–examine African–Americans' way of life, their needs, their aspirations their history/story–in short and aesthetic tradition of their culture. This thesis has tried to explore opposition that separates art and politics, for Morrison cultural structures of injustice and oppression without jeopardizing the artfulness of her fiction. By using dislocations in time and space free indirect discourse, multiple positioned narrative voices, skeins of freighted images instead of authorial omniscience as commentary among other narrative techniques. She is able to recreate the Afro–America past. This study shows how Morrison became multivalent cultural icon who spoke truth to empower, gave voice to voiceless Afro–Americans.Jazzrepresents grief, politically situated yet not personally chosen maternal neglect and loss, the ravages of war, passionate sexual love, and female as the object of a murderous gaze. Morrison thematically establishes memory as a potential force for restoring the past. Jazzoffers alleviation from the displacement to the preservation of family and cultural memory as a source of self–definition where the loss of 'memory' reinforces the loss of 'family', 'fertility' and 'identity'.