Jazz Fictions

In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison famously defines invisibility as a state of being “never quite on the beat.” Ellison frames the novel as a kind of translation of the invisible rhythm the narrator hears in the music of Louis Armstrong, a syncopated rhythm rooted in Black aesthetic and cultural forms. “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” James Baldwin shared Ellison’s compulsion: “I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound.” This intensive seminar considers how African American writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present engaged with the jazz tradition to make music of invisibility. How does fiction address the political issues and aesthetic challenges raised by jazz and jazz musicians? How do writers translate the invisible rhythms of jazz into jazz fiction? Novelists include Rudolph Fisher, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison.