Finding a place of my own: Home and the paradox of blues expressiveness (Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Randall Kenan, Gayl Jones, Ralph Ellison)

In post Great Migration literature, the act of making a home has been represented as an attempt to create a safe place that might nurture otherwise threatened people. At the center of "home" we discover an implied community which is given to stand united against a dangerous "outside" world; but the cohesiveness of the "interior" community is challenged by the dissemination of power. When home fails to be the protective space that it is projected to be, blues expressiveness is evoked in the works studied here, as a metaphorical shelter which might offer safety and rest. Chapter one, "Flight for Freedom: The Northern City as Home," examines Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in order to explore the new urban landscape as the backdrop of an African American search for home. The second chapter, "Baby Girl Blues: The Volatile Nature of Home in The Bluest Eye and Corregidora," examines the formidable attempt by the female protagonists, Toni Morrison's Pecola and Gayl Jones' Ursa, respectively, to reconfigure the chaos of their lives. Finally, "Who is 'Us'?: Community and the Politics of Home," utilizes Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits and Morrison's Song of Solomon to analyze the links between home and community, as well as, the potentially devastating consequences that result when those boundaries are not clearly defined.