Discrimination in “the City”: Race, Class, and Gender in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Golam Rabbani

Abstract


Toni Morrison, the African American Nobel laureate author, explores the realities where African American women face multiple discriminations in her novel Jazz (1992). This article, following the qualitative method on the bibliographic study, examines the discriminations entailing race, class, and gender and presents Harlem as a discriminatory space in the novel. Jazz narrates the struggles of African American women who settled in Harlem in the early twentieth-century. Haunted by the memories of slavery, the female African American characters in the novel find themselves subjugated in the society dominated by white Americans and also experience oppression within their black community. Harlem, denoted as “the City” in the novel, identifies itself as the relational space where black women experience the intersecting subjugation and alienation from their race, class, and gender positions.

Keywords


Racial Discrimination, Class Conflict, Gender Discrimination, Critical Race Study, Toni Morrison, Jazz

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.10n.5p.128

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