Aspects of Cultural Memory in Jazz, by Toni Morrison

Abstract

The themes produced by Toni Morrison in the last fifty years deal with issues related to the cultural and political resistance of black communities in the United States in the midst of the history of the African American diaspora, addressing race relations, construction of black identity, spirituality and sexuality. The award-winning writer conquered American society and literary criticism by the peculiar way in which she directed her characters in the contexts of political, social, economic, cultural disorders and ethnic conflicts that her engaged writing elucidates. Thus, she exposed very creatively the dilemma of the American black people who struggle to achieve prosperity and racial emancipation without severing the ties of ancestry that are responsible for sustaining the identity of African Americans. This work intends to examine how acts of remembrance are configured as one of the devices used in the novel Jazz, published by Toni Morrison in 1992, to narrate the horrors that continued to happen during the years following the abolition of slavery in the United States. Thus, we aim to analyze the memories of one of the protagonists of the novel, the character Joe Trace, in the light, mainly, of the fourth chapter of the first part of Aleida Assmann’s book Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, which explores the construction of individual identity based on acts of remembrance. We also intend to analyze how the experiential memories of horror brought by the character make up the artistic strategy of the author Toni Morrison, who thus becomes a disseminating agent of the cultural memory of the trauma of American slavery through literature. Bearing in mind that one of the biggest challenges of the postmodern world is the anti-racist struggle, we would like to demonstrate, once again, how Toni Morrison's literature supports this struggle to be won.