Show and Tell: Passing and Narrative in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Employing the Foucauldian notion of dispositif, this article suggests the possibility of theorizing racialization as a process involving lines of light and of enunciation, of power and subjectification, that entwine in the placing of people within racial categories. The argument is staged upon a reading of Toni Morrison's Jazz , especially because the novel begins to open up the question of how sight and discourse interrelate. Such an exploration enables an emphasis on the importance of the role of the narrator and narrative in 'visuality' and the interpretation of embodied movement. Moreover it gives occasion to suggest how an 'optical politics' requires an attention to the historical complex that trains the way in which vision has operated with shifting understandings of 'race' and colour.