Volume V Issue IV October-December 2025

Name of Author : Navya Lisa Charles, Dr. R.Raja Sekar

Title of the paper : Blues as Form and Archive: Musical Orality, Memory, and Narrative Structure in Gayl Joness Corregidora

Abstract: Corregidora by Gayl Jones is widely recognized as a landmark in the African American literature due to its strong representation of trauma, memory, and survival of the generation. This paper will discuss the way the novel uses the blues as both a musical genre and an archival practice, which maintains the lived history of Black women muted by the slavery and sexual violence. Considering the points of convergence between musical orality and narrative form, the paper presents the thesis that the blues serves as an active place of embodied memory, resistance, and narration. The aesthetics of blues, which Jones adopts through the voice of the protagonist Ursa Corregidora and her quest to reassert agency in the wake of the traumatic experience, include repetition, call and response, improvisation, fragmentation, among other elements that she uses to create a narrative, which reflects the affective rhythms of the musical piece itself. By turning the blues into an intergenerational repository, the novel becomes a place of violence and survival in a time when the history of the world has failed. This study proves that Corregidora places the blues as a creative practice and as a counter historical archive, as a style of cultural memory, which challenges the erasure process and focuses on Black female subjectivity.

Keywords : Blues, Corregidora, Musical Orality, Archive, Memory, Trauma Narrative, African American Literature.

DOI :

Page Number : 4-9