Race and Gender Discrimination in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Abstract

In her 1992 novel Jazz, Toni Morrison—an African American Nobel laureate—examines the ways in which African American women experience various forms of discrimination. This paper investigates the discriminations involving race, class, and gender and portrays Harlem as a discriminatory setting in the novel, using the qualitative technique on the bibliographic study. Jazz tells the story of the hardships faced by African American women who settled in Harlem at the beginning of the 20th century. The female African American characters in the book, who are still troubled by memories of slavery, find themselves oppressed both inside their own black community and in the society that is ruled by white people. In the book, Harlem is referred to as "the City" and describes itself as the relational setting where black women encounter the overlapping alienation and subjection from their racial, social class, and gender roles.