Changing the subject: narrating freedom in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz

Abstract

In both her critical and fictional work, Toni Morrison repeatedly emphasises the importance of narrative and storytelling to African-American emancipation. For Morrison, storytelling is a strategy of defence and self-empowerment which allows African-Americans to actively participate in a world that places considerable limits on their claim to, and expression of, individual agency. At the same time that she represents characters who combat oppression by exerting control over the contents and meanings of their self-narratives, Morrison's novels perform this emancipation, redressing representational bias' and power relations that have effected the "silence of the black person". Taking Beloved and Jazz as exempla, I examine the difficulties that inhere in an emancipatory project built around the assumption of the speaking position, paying particular attention to the consequences of non-reciprocal power relations. Far from an unqualified valorisation of storytelling, the novels demonstrate that speech and narrative can both facilitate and constrain the recovery of suppressed knowledge, the continued functioning of the individual and the community, and the (re)construction of alternative subject positions.