This study aims at exploring the aspects of racial discrimination described in the novel “The Jazz”. In this study, the phenomenal endeavour of Toni Morrison against tribal prejudice would also be analyzed .This research delineates that despite their best efforts Violet, Joe and dorcas fail to disassociate themselves with their society. The research delineate their thirst to become the part of society in which they are socially upbringing. she portrays her own race in her idiosyncratic way.
Textual analysis has been used to collect and analyze the underlying factual details. Key terms; Afro-American , black, nigger, racial discrimination.Introduction to the study;This study is undertaken to explore the issues of inequality and social injustice coined in Toni Morrison’s writings. Race always matters a lot in Morrison’s fiction .
In six previous novels including ” Beloved”, ” Song of Solomon” and ” Jazz” .She has concentrated on the particular delights and dejections in black American woman’s lives. she has made it her mission of get African-American voices into American literature.When she began, there was just one thing she wanted to write about , the most helpless unit in the society, a black female and a child she writes in her novel “Jazz” about what it was like to be the subject of racism. Toni Morrison’s fictional characters in the novel are marked by four distinct phases including anger, fights, self discovery and haloing of the African culture. Morrison agrees that as an Afro-American it is her responsibility to reflect African side along with her American side. Objective of the study :This research aims at exploring the contentious state of Afro-American people through Toni Morrison’s writing especially her novel “Jazz,. the consequences of psychological and physical domination would be analyzed .
This study also aims at expressing her sentiments being a black writer.Literature review:The writings by Americans of African ancestry mirror the dilemmas and responses of the creative imagination to the Negro’s social experience in America.Beginning with the nineteenth century slave narratives, the African-American text established itself as a medium of propaganda .A substantial portion of African-American folklore not only contains dominant themes found throughout African-American literature but in every bit as politically socially and culturally important as any other literary form.Barbara Christian in her work “Black feminist Criticism “says, “The existence of the mulatto, who combined the physical characteristics of both races denied their claims that blacks were not human, while allowing them the argument that they were not human, while allowing them the argument that they were lifting up the race by lightening it” James Weldon Johnson’s remarkable “The autobiography of an Ex-colored Man”, deals directly with the problems of racial classification .It had a deep influence upon younger writers of later Harlem Renaissance.
Racial prejudice for African Americans in Morrison’s writing:”Jazz” by Toni Morrison reviews many different characteristics of Afro-Americans lives in the early part of twentieth centure .Racial prejudice is supposed to be considered as one of the dominant themes of Jazz .We cannot say however that the racial prejudice in in Toni Morrison’s mind.
For she has anything she has racial complex or to be more correct racial consciousness. This novel reveals incidents of the difficulties faced by black families living in the United States. she narrates in detail a few upsetting situations they had to face. We find Dorcas’ mother being killed in a fire simply because the fire engine did not bother to go to the “black part of the town” from where she belongs..Even she could not have ambulance service on time. She writes in novel,”The train shivered with them at the thought but went on and sure enough there was ground up ahead and the trembling became the dancing under their feet. Joe stood up, his fingers clutching the baggage that way ,and told Cooley to do the same” “They were hanging there ,a young country couple, a laughing and tapping back at the tracks, when the attendant came through ,pleasant but unsmiling now that he didn’t have to smile in this car full of colored people”.
There is another side of the picture revealing Negros psychology ,in so many cases negroes suffer from not White people but their own poverty and backwardness. They suffer from their own inferiority complex. ” it wasn’t so hard to ask an older sister to look out for a husband and the field because she was bound for Baltimore with Miss Vera Louise for a while true belle was twenty-seven and when would she ever get to see a great big otherwise”Throughout the novel, the reader remains in perplexity of discriminating in a racial complex, racial consciousness and racial awareness. Nowhere in the novel the writer lets it be clear what she aims at. Perhaps they are the steps to some racial formation or propaganda. “Dorcas said no. She said she was all right .To please leave her alone and let her rest .
But I did it. Called the ambulance I means;but it didn’t come until morning after I had called twice. The ice, they said, but really because it was coloured people calling.
She bled to death all through that woman’s bed sheets on into the mattress, and u can tell you that women didn’t like it one but Thats all she talked about her and Dorcas’ boyfriend. The blood what a mess it made. That’s all they talked about.”Ex. The discrepancy between ‘white’ and ‘black’ perverted social existence at all its levels .The superiority of the ‘white’ is reinforced by Christian ideas of fair and foul. The pain and the disease of never being accepted spread from the unequal social level .
The intensity of hatred faced by black shape their identity, and there comes Toni Morrison’s Jazz, an embodiment of reaction against racial prejudice. “To be black and to be a woman is to be a double outsider, to be twice oppressed, to be more than invisible .That’s a triple vision.”(June Jordan)
