BLACK MODERNITY AND TONI MORRISON’S RHETORIC OF (ABSENT) LOVE
BLACK MODERNITY AND TONI MORRISON’S RHETORIC OF (ABSENT) LOVE

Summary/Abstract: There is a long tradition of using the love-hate dichotomy as a rhetorical trope in the African American struggle for emancipation. In an interview with Toni Morrison (The Nation, May 24, 2004) Cornel West points out the peculiar function of African American love as a catalyst for change which “takes on subversive status” rather than being “just a gesture”. When, throughout history, a people has been “systematically taught to hate themselves” (West 2004), love – the opposite of hatred – becomes the most effective means of resistance and of claiming ownership of one’s history. This rhetoric that posits love not so much as a goal in itself, but rather as a catalyst of reconciliation has its origins in the process of forging a black modernity during the Harlem Renaissance. As an author, Toni Morrison is on a mission to write for and from within the African American community. She goes back to that historical time of formation of an African American modern consciousness and explores alternative forms of writing through the rhythms of jazz and of resistance through love. While jazz is to Morrison the language through which African Americans learnt to exist in history, love is a strategy that opposes the hatred of history. In combining them, Morrison’s writing creates its own technical means to dissent from what she calls the whiteness of the American literary canon. This paper will argue that love is a central trope in Morrison’s shaping of an alternative African American, non-WASP modern narrative rhetoric and will analyse the evolution of this rhetoric in her novels Jazz and Love, in which mechanisms of dysfunctional love are turned into political strategies for the forging of an African American modern discourse.

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