Ursa Corregidora's "New World Song" and the (Im)possibilities of a Blues Aesthetics

Abstract: Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) has long been regarded central to understanding a turn toward neo-slavery narratives within Black women's fiction of the 1970s. My reading extends the many excellent readings of the novel by elaborating, and enacting, a close attention to the movement and transformation of the text—both of its first-person protagonist and its form. My argument focuses on a generative instance late in the novel, a metafictional moment in which the first-person narrator and protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, interrupts her narrative, reconfiguring what has preceded it, narratologically and ontologically shifting the novel's force. No longer a novel about a blues singer, Corregidora 's transformation into a "blues novel," I argue, has generic and diasporic implications for reading the vast temporalities the novel assembles, maps, and probes. The aesthetic and epistemological effects of this "novelizing" of the blues renders more concrete the novel's exemplarity as a profound and generative instance of a radically diasporic literary consciousness within Black women's fiction. Key to understanding the singular gift of this novel's diasporic historical consciousness is how it yields only belatedly the context for understanding its narratological origins, the (im)possibilities for what the blues affords. While in one sense the novel gestures toward a "man-done-her-wrong" thematic, it elaborates with astonishing specificity the entangled relations between such intimate harm and the global structures within which its characters must be situated and seen as historical subjects. For what its transformation into a "blues novel" powerfully reveals is the everyday and the world-historical as interpenetrating dramas. In its own voice, and by way of song, the novel at once refuses and beautifully revises the very historical conditionality of African diasporic peoples in the so-called New World/"Plantation America."