Veranstalter:
Englisches Seminar I, Universität zu Köln
Ort:
Seminargebäude, Raum S23, Universitätsstraße 37, 50931 Köln, und via Zoom
Wann:
09.12.2024, 18:00 - 19:30 Uhr
Information:
The Harlem of the 1920s is widely considered a site of African American cultural and social liberation. With Jazz (1992), Toni Morrison turns to that historical moment and location but tells a slightly different story, one in which the collective hope for freedom and self-determination in the Northern city is interlaced with individual experiences of betrayal, the inescapable power of desire, and violence. In order to tell that story, Morrison mobilizes a literary motif deeply rooted in American narrative traditions: the contrast between wildness and domestication. I will argue, that Jazz is not only a historical novel about the African American experience of the Great Migration and the importance of Harlem in the cultural history of Black America. In its approach to the city as a space inscribed by traces of the southern wild, Jazz also offers itself to be read as an allegory of modernity as a socially and ecologically precarious condition.