“A New Kind of Music”

Abstract

The concluding chapter considers the implications of jazz in Paule Marshall’s writing, specifically in her 2000 novel The Fisher King. Marshall has long been identified with her commitment to Pan-Africanism, but she is less frequently identified as a novelist who features music as a mode of affirming or restoring a consciousness of African heritage. Like Marshall’s previous novels, The Fisher King represents a Black Atlantic geography of migration through a resolutely feminist perspective. In portraying postwar Paris as a site of refuge—especially for jazz musicians like the novel’s Caribbean-American male protagonist—The Fisher King furthermore revisits the most prominent site of twentieth-century black internationalism. Interweaving narratives of African American and Caribbean migration with mythic narratives of African American expatriation and jazz history, The Fisher King invokes both the utopian desire associated with jazz improvisation and the more realist lyricism of the blues.