Musical Aesthetics And Identity Construction In Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Toni Morrison has repeatedly mentioned in her essays and interviews the term "music", to express her love for black music and even to black music and even to stress the importance of jazz in her political aesthetic. Music imagerys show up in Toni Morrison’s novels constantly. Even some of her novels are named after music, such as the main research object of this paper:Jazz. In the novel, Morrison tells the history of "the jazz age" in United States as content, and uses some elements from black music like jazz, blues as narration. This paper attempts to explore what role the jazz-style narrative plays in presenting the theme of the novel, namely identity construction of African Americans, and in expressing the intent of the author. The paper is divided into three chapters:Chapter one:Point out that, through "the Great Migration", black immigrants who migrated from the rural South to northern cities had a strong sense of dislocation, they lost the ir link with their past, the South, and the black community, which made them unable to form self-identity in the metropolitan. A new viable identity is needed to be negotiated.Chapter two:In the respect of narrative, the narrative discourse of the novel reflects the characteristics of jazz music:improvisation, polyrhythm, multiple melodies, etc. Especially for the mysterious narrator of the novel (a blend of first-person and third-person, narrative voice and character in the novel) and the jazzified narrative structure. In the respect of culture, jazz makes it possible for the African Americans to express their voice that long been depressed. Besides, with the help of the "call-response" pattern, jazz starts to group therapy and uses a ambiguous strategy of discourse, being signify for the black to renegotiate the social space.Chapter three:From the point of view of "minor literature" of Deleuze and Guattari, explore how Morrison in this novel account for the production of identities and their material political effects on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how to work towards transforming such identity production, pointing to a post-identity possibility.