Narration and Migration: Jazz and Vernacular Theories of Black Women's Fiction

Abstract

The unique identity of the black women's novel often hinges on its continuities with the oral traditions of the rural South. Houston Baker, in his study of black women novelists, argues that there is a field of 'particular' or imagery unique to the Afro-American imagination (Workings 61), and, locating this field in vernacular southern culture (30), Baker goes on to castigate those black women novelists who set up residence in the North (34). By Baker's logic, figurative departure from the field of the South results in the mulattoization (35) or dilution of the racial ideologies projected by these novelists. Literalizing Baker's figure of departure from the South to refer to the successive waves of black migration to the urban North, I would like to explore how the history of migration bears upon the claim that black women's fiction distinguishes itself by its rootedness in Southern oral traditions. This question carries important implications for paradigms of black women's fiction, most of which ground themselves in a symbolic geography that polarizes the literary and cultural values associated with the rural South and the urban North. Such paradigms have shaped the formation of a black women's fictional tradition, helping to canonize novelists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, all of whom privilege the rural South as the site of an essentially black cultural tradition. I shall examine the historical and geographical directions of criticism of black women's fiction, with reference to a specific moment in black cultural history-the Great Migration of the early twentieth century-which conditioned the subsequent development of black literary as well as oral cultures. I concentrate on Toni Morrison, whose critical and fictional works persistently assess the implications of the migration for black fiction and have contributed to the development of