Jazz aesthetic form in Toni Morrison's "Jazz‪"‬

This text attempts to explore Toni Morrison’s 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 Morrison’s 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 Morrison’s 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.