Jazz and the Future Blues: Toni Morrison's Urban Folk Zone

Toni Morrison's Jazz represents a significant intervention into an ongoing Black cultural discourse in which the terms blues and jazz are ideologically freighted. Morrison's novel evokes many of the controversies of the Black Aesthetic movement, in which blues was widely regarded as an artifact of an abjured Southern past, and jazz was viewed as an expression of urban-revolutionary modernism. Morrision revisits this argument by placing it in the context of the Black urban diaspora of the early 20th Century, troubling the boundaries between blues and jazz, cultural tradition and innovation, and vernacular and commodity culture.