Memory and Performance in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s African American literature, especially her novel Jazz, presents a fertile ground for the maintenance of African culture and oral traditions. Through the performance of the text, she bends chronological time, allowing access to fragmented ancestral memories that ensure not only the survival of their knowledge and culture but also inscribe their transformations, recreations, and rearrangements as they interact with the European culture of the colonizers. The choice of jazz as both form and content of the novel is part of a project to displace the reader’s thinking; it is not only a musical style with Black roots but also one of the first art forms from Africa to be accepted by white society, shifting their ancestral knowledge from the margins to the center of American culture. The music is based on the improvised solos of musicians, yet its final work is collective. Jazz is a novel of multiplicities, of rhizomatic expansions, of experimentation with language, of sensory and expressive effects, and of memory reconstruction.