Toni Morrison’s Jazz in Socio-historical Preservationist’s Perspective

Many African American writers have focused their literary efforts on their past to rediscover what had been lost and intentionally repressed since the institution of American slavery. Jazz, written by Toni Morrison, reexamines the cross-generational suffering since slavery. She strives to redefine the meaning and sensibility of the lives of African Americans in the traumatic South as she specifically depicts their subjective experiences that are often encountered. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the African American historical narrative, Jazz, as it has impacted and continues to impact the lives of African Americans today. Morrison displays in her literary work a perceptive sense of African American history as she views the South as the ancestral home of African Americans. The literary portrayal of black southerners during significant historical moments of American history such as the institution of American Slavery, the Great Migration, and the life in the Harlem community is extensively discussed chronologically as Morrison intentionally elaborates the complexity of their private experiences. It is not analyzed in the dimensions of a political, nor a rigidly economic perspective, but rather as a cultivated expression of socio-historical perspective of the cross-generational suffering of African Americans. In Jazz, Morrison surveys, evaluates, and critiques the socio-historical perspective of African Americans as she records the various empirical incidents and subjective experiences to preserve their long-forgotten past. As she recounts the stories of their present circumstances in the Harlem community, Morrison’s Jazz continuously suggests that history is not yet over and that a conscious historical connection to their lives in the past is needed in order to obtain a long psychological happiness of their present being in a new environment.