Narrating the blues: Music and discursive strategies in selected African-American, Afro -Caribbean and Black South African fiction

This dissertation responds to the challenge Toni Morrison posed in arguing that what she tries to do has "perhaps best been done in (black) music," and calling for criticism that will judge her fiction and that of black women on its own rather than "other people's grades," especially the Anglo-American canon. I focus on the ways in which music provides myths of identity for literary texts, authorizes these novels historically, and can orient them toward specific political ends. What I offer then reaches out from Morrison in a contribution to subaltern studies.;My response to Morrison deliberately appropriates Houston Baker's notion of the blues "as a matrix" and "enabling script" for a comparative reading of texts by black writers from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. Expressing concern for writing by black women, Morrison also called for the broadening of criticism both by rejecting an exclusively American identity and by claiming kinship with what she describes as "the third world." I take up this invitation to rethink comparative studies of black literatures and expressive arts in the era of globalization.;I study here texts that engage blues and jazz as an expressive code shared by black writers from the United States, the Caribbean, and South Africa. Chapter One examines blues and jazz in relationship to literature. Chapter Two turns to Morrison's reading of James Baldwin as "ancestor" to examine ways in which the two writers use jazz and blues in their fiction. Chapter Three examines Kamau Brathwaite's essay on jazz and the Caribbean novel, reinterpreting his reading of George Lamming's The Emigrants and Roger Mais's Brother Man. Chapter Four takes Daniel Maximin's L'isole soleil as a reconstruction of the history of Guadeloupe through music. Chapter Five follows Mongane Serote's novel of South African blues from the demise of Sophiatown in the Fifties to the Soweto uprising of 1976. My final argument is that the writers of these texts engage in acts of identity through the use of blues and their creative work.