Migration has been central in the making of African-American history and culture and in the total American experience. African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and free. A forced migration from Africa - the transatlantic slave trade - carried black people to the Americas. A second forced migration - the internal slave trade -transported them from the Atlantic coast to the interior of the American South. A third migration - this time initiated largely, but not always, by black Americans - carried black people from the rural South to the urban North. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, African American life is again being transformed by another migration, this time a global one, as peoples of African descent from all parts of the world enter the United States. This time, the migration of the African Americans is back to the south - a conscious movement from the industrial context of the North for the rural existence in the South. To Bill Ashcroft, the idea of the place is just as constructed as identity itself, and contrary to our understanding of it as just a geographical space, for the migrants or the displaced, it becomes a constant trope of difference in postcolonial writing, a continual reminder of colonial ambivalence and of the separation, yet continual mixing of the colonizer and the colonized. The proposed study attempts at highlighting Toni Morrison’s cultural vision as reflected in her novel Jazz (1992) by studying the work from the prism of the third Great Migration of the African Americans in the early twentieth century that entails the process of dislocation and relocation. The post colonial critical paradigm of “transforming space” will be ... ... middle of paper ... ...wood Press, 2009. Print. Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison: Contemporary World Writers. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Print. Morrison, Toni Jazz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Print. ---. Beloved . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Print. Mbalia, Dorothea Drummond. Toni Morrison’s: Developing Class Consciousness. Second edn. United States: Susquehanna University Press, 2004. Print. Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie. “Toni Morrison's Jazz and the City. “ African American Review, 35. 2 (Summer 2001): 219-231. Print. Thornton Jerome E. “The Paradoxical Journey of the African American in African American Fiction.” New Literary History, 21.3 (Spring 1990): 733-745. Print. Van Der Zee, James. The Harlem Book of the Dead. Dobbs Ferry: Morgan & Morgan, 1978. Print. Welty, Eudora. The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews. London: Virago, 1987. Print.
Welty Acknowledges her mother, and her impressionability in influencing her has the eager reader, great author and person that she is when writing this book. Welty remembers her mother “picking up The Man in lower ten while [her] hair got dried enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make [her] look like my idol, Mary Pickford” this suggests that if she copied both Mary Pickford and her mother, her mother was also her idol because her mother “was very sharing of [the] feeling of Insatiability”. This shows that Welty picked up reading from her mother and that’s and Welty’s mother knew her daughter was easily influenced which is why she said Welty was “too impressionable”. This then reveals to readers the root of Welty’s compassion for books as she was growing up. Welty also remembers “a generation later… “her mother “reading the new issue of time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game ... with the children”. This shows that the passion within Welty’s mother, that influenced Welty as a young child to read, has not burned out. Due to that wetly wants readers to understand that her mother has influenced her whole life and career with her burning passion to read. This tells readers that Eudora Welty’s own passion for reading will never cease to
The author skirts around the central issue of racism by calling it a “class struggle” within the white population of Boston during the 1960s and 1970s. Formisano discuses the phenomenon known as “white flight”, where great numbers of white families left the cities for the suburbs. This was not only for a better lifestyle, but a way to distance themselves from the African Americans, who settled in northern urban areas following the second Great Migration.
113-117. Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1990. Malcolm X. "On Afro-American History" - "The History of American History" Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, MA. 24 Jan 1965.
The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience. Ed. Gabriel Burns Stepto. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 2003.
Eudora Welty was not silent when it came to social issues. In her own, sometimes-quiet ways, she fought discrimination and racism and inequality. She voiced her opinions and beliefs. Her stories can speak loudly of the injustices of a tainted society, but these protests are only heard by those who immerse themselves in her work, by those who reach beneath the surface to find the true meaning of the subtle events that comprise her stories.
Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, K. A. (eds.). Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York, Amistad, 1993.
The image of African-American’s changed from rural, uneducated “peasants” to urban, sophisticated, cosmopolites. Literature and poetry are abounded. Jazz music and the clubs where it was performed at became social “hotspots”. Harlem is the epitome of the “New Negro”. However, things weren’t as sunny as they appeared.
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “ Toni Morrison.” The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.508-510.
Music often carries information about community knowledge, aesthetics, or perspectives. Toni Morrison discusses the power of music and the way it functions in culture in discussions of her craft. Symbolic and structural elements of music appear throughout all of Toni Morrison’s fiction in one way or another. (Obadike) As mentioned above, the title itself, draws attention to the world-renowned music created by African Americans in the 1920s’ as well as to the book’s jazz-like narrative structure and themes.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Challenging existing perceptions of narrative authority is a common writing practice amongst authors. While Morrison works to reassess the role of the narrative voice, she does so in an unconventional manner. In her novel Jazz, Morrison draws attention to the unreliability of the narrator through her1 inconsistency and bias. Morrison's flawed narrator helps connect her book to postmodernist African-American themes. By restructuring the narrative role within the book, Morrison makes her book Jazz a postmodernist text.
Isaacs, Neil D.. Life for Phoenix.? The Critical Response to Eudora Welty(tm)s Fiction. ed. Laurie Champion. London: Greenwood, 1994. 37-42.
Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, notes in the opening lines of the text that, “as a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer” (3). By claiming this, Morrison indicates that she is approaching literature with a self-awareness that allows her to recognize how the “Africanist presence” in works dominated by white traditions is constructed. She hopes to broaden the “landscape” for studying American literature and by approaching it as a writer, she intends to explain why this is important.
Along with treating white Americans as the norm, Morrison illustrates that American literature portrays the black experience as insignificant and unworthy of attention. ...
12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright is a photo and text book which poetically tells the tale of African Americans from the time they were taken from Africa to the time things started to improve for them in a 149 page reflection. Using interchanging series of texts and photographs, Richard Wright encompasses the voices of 12 Million African-Americans, and tells of their sufferings, their fears, the phases through which they have gone and their hopes. In this book, most of the photos used were from the FSA: Farm Security Administration and a few others not from them. They were selected to complement and show the points of the text. The African-Americans in the photos were depicted with dignity. In their eyes, even though clearly victims, exists strengths and hopes for the future. The photos indicated that they could and did create their own culture both in the past and present. From the same photos plus the texts, it could be gathered that they have done things to improve their lives of their own despite the many odds against them. The photographs showed their lives, their suffering, and their journey for better lives, their happy moments, and the places that were of importance to them. Despite the importance of the photographs they were not as effective as the text in showing the African-American lives and how the things happening in them had affected them, more specifically their complex feelings. 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright represents the voice of African-Americans from their point of view of their long journey from Africa to America, and from there through their search for equality, the scars and prints of where they come from, their children born during these struggles, their journeys, their loss, and plight...