Cultural Awakening and Literary Assertion: Exploring Musical Dimensions in the Narratives of Toni Morrison’s Novels

Abstract

The African American literature has been constant in responding to the hegemonic Western literary traditions which had historically marginalized and excluded the voices of the Black. Imitated by social, cultural and institutional imposition, early African American writers devised a more subtle dual or double-voiced approach to expression. This approach helped them to take part in the hegemonic white discourse and at the same time, they managed to incorporate subtextual change of expression of the realities along with the cultural memory and resistance of the African American communities. The Harlem Renaissance was an important turning point as it
led to a confident and self-conscious Black identity in literature. It stimulated a new contact with African inheritance, folklores, music and vernacular traditions and widened the range of representation and provoked the reductivity and totalizing constructions of Blackness.