The "Blackness of Blackness". The city and identity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore identity and individuality when entering and living in the city for African Americans in the 1920s. More specifically I aim to explore how migrating North from the South caused a crisis of identity for many African Americans and why this happened. Principally through looking at the novels Invisible Man and Jazz, but also through using essays on the city and identity from the same time period. In locating the “why”, I don’t aim to come up with a solution but to instead use the novels as a way to argue why there is no universal solution on how to “deal” with living in the city for African Americans. However there is a potential substratum, as the principal element in deciding how to live in the city, is first realizing, concretely, who you are and subsequently where you fit into the world. I am therefore using the crisis of living in the city to set up an argument for the importance of self-assertion. This importance is underscored in both respective novels. I am also using the idea of the metronomic beat from jazz music as a potential foundational element in reaching this realization. The realization that “to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (DuBois 368).