Building Intimacy: The Erotic Architectures of Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay utilizes theories on modern architecture and urban space to analyze Toni Morrison’s depiction of the black urban experience in her 1992 novel Jazz. Reading the experience of modern space as linked to violence and transgression, the book suggests paths to black public citizenship that are founded on the building of intimacy in the disciplined space of the city. The novel’s representations of city space, intimacy, and erotic transgression are mirrored in its narrative architectures, which invite readers into transgressive reading postures. Complicating the reader’s relationship with the text, the “talking book” of Jazz simulates modern architectural space in its challenge to the interior and exterior dimensions of textual space. In this way, Jazz generates zones of textual intimacy that simulate the spaces of the modern city, spaces that in Morrison’s novel make possible a critical redefinition of the African American self.