Textuality in a Jazz Aesthetic: Textual Rituals for Transformation in Sharon Bridgforth’slove conjure/blues

AbstractTermed a “performance novel” in the introduction to the Redbone Press edition and a “text installation” in its performance iteration, Sharon Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues (2004) is performance literature that also offers a heightened textual experience within the jazz aesthetic’s performance tradition. Through its intricate lineation, syntax, typography, orthography, punctuation, and onomatopoeia, as well as through the representation of text in ritual settings, Bridgforth’s textuality does its own performance work on the page, twining literature, orature, bodily, and spiritual experience tightly together as it affirms multiple literacies, building on queer, trans, African American, Yoruba, jazz, and southern histories. In Bridgforth’s counterintuitive interest in and commitment to textuality within a performance genre, we see the values of the theatrical jazz aesthetic itself: here, invention and multiplicity are borne out by its groundedness in text and performance at once, in textual and embodied language together. In this way Bridgforth’s textuality serves the text’s rituality and the jazz aesthetic’s own goals. By focalizing textuality’s materiality, love conjure/blues claims ritual textuality as a tool with distinctive affordances within the jazz aesthetic tradition. This highly physicalized, ritual textuality acts as an instrument of conjure and contributes to the text’s representational and spiritual goals while expanding our concept of what innovative poetic texts might look like and accomplish.