Recreation of History to Regain Cultural Pattern inToni Morrison'sJazz
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Department of English
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'.