Jazz (1992)

Abstract

Jazz is set in Harlem during ‘The Harlem Renaissance’, in 1926, midway through a decade when the United States was in the throes of ‘The Jazz Age’ or ‘The Roaring Twenties’. White histories of the period tend to see its creative and cultural ferment as a response to the Armistice of 1919. But Harlem and the city in general had a different significance for African-Americans and it is this, rather than the postwar euphoria which was essentially part of white history, which Morrison tries to recover in Jazz. In this respect, the focus of interest is the same as in the early novels; the black communities which exist behind and which transcend the boundaries drawn up by the whites to define and contain them.