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The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.
Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
104 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1992
436 people are currently reading
17703 people want to read
About the author
Toni Morrison
245books22.2kfollowersChloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
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October 13, 2018
This is a series of lectures by Toni Morrison focussing on literary criticism and American literature. Morrison discusses the “Africanist� presence in classic American literature. She analyses how the sense of whiteness, freedom, individualism and manhood depends on a black presence and population and also reacts to it; and projects fears and emotions onto it.
Morrison turns her eye onto Poe, Twain, Cather, Melville and Hemingway and does it very effectively. She looks at Jim in Huckleberry Finn, Wesley in To Have and Have Not and Nancy in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, amongst others. The silent unnamed figures are also considered.
Her considerations are very telling and the analysis of To Have and Have Not sheds new light on what Hemingway was doing and how he perceived maleness and whiteness. Morrison has talked about the pervasive influence of race:
“The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There is always one more thing.�
The focus here of course is on the white literary imagination and how it manages, controls and silences anything that is other, but particularly African Americans. Morrison provides a way of critiquing the literary canon. The arguments are succinct and nuanced, but this is an easy read and quite focussed. The scope is narrow, but these are lectures and have that feel about them. Morrison’s insights are original and interesting. This is worth reading for the analysis of Hemingway alone.
Morrison turns her eye onto Poe, Twain, Cather, Melville and Hemingway and does it very effectively. She looks at Jim in Huckleberry Finn, Wesley in To Have and Have Not and Nancy in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, amongst others. The silent unnamed figures are also considered.
Her considerations are very telling and the analysis of To Have and Have Not sheds new light on what Hemingway was doing and how he perceived maleness and whiteness. Morrison has talked about the pervasive influence of race:
“The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There is always one more thing.�
The focus here of course is on the white literary imagination and how it manages, controls and silences anything that is other, but particularly African Americans. Morrison provides a way of critiquing the literary canon. The arguments are succinct and nuanced, but this is an easy read and quite focussed. The scope is narrow, but these are lectures and have that feel about them. Morrison’s insights are original and interesting. This is worth reading for the analysis of Hemingway alone.
August 24, 2021
/// this is what ya'll should be reading instead ///
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a 1992 work of literary criticism by Toni Morrison.
In 1990, Morrison delivered a series of three lectures at Harvard University; she then adapted the texts to a 91-page book consisting of three essays of metacritical explorations into the operations of whiteness and blackness in the literature of white writers in the United States. Toni Morrison takes the position that the existing literary criticism in the United States has provided incomplete readings of its canonical literature by refusing to acknowledge and analyse the Africanist persona present in it.
Linda Krumholz described Morrison's project as "reread[ing] the American literary canon through an analysis of whiteness to propose the ways that black people were used to establish American identity."
Michael Eric Dyson observes that in addition to this exploration of the "white literary imagination...Playing in the Dark is also about a black intellectual seizing the interpretive space within a racially ordered hierarchy of cultural criticism. Blacks are usually represented through the lens of white perception rather than the other way around...With [Playing in the Dark], a substantial change is portended."
In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, making her one of the most-assigned of all female writers (which makes me very happy btw).
I have to admit that I did not fully understand the essay due to its academic nature and my lack of knowledge of Morrison's references. Since the target audience were students familiar with the topic and other professors, this is not surprising. However, I don't think that Morrison did a good job of providing useful and practical analytic tools for dissecting canonical literature. Her approach and her created categories were too abstract for that, nonetheless the food for thought she provided with this essay is invaluable.
I have a hard time reviewing this book (since I did have comprehension issues), so I think I will just give you a little insight into what I took from it:
1 The construction of white identity
Toni Morrison claims that white American fiction has fabricated a black persona that is "reflexive," a means for whites to contemplate their own terror and desire without having to acknowledge these feelings as their own.
Oftentimes, black characters function as surrogates to the white man's identity, thus ensuring that the white author and his characters know that they themselves are not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desireable; not helpess, but powerful.
It plays very well into the thoughts of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, that the white man's identity is constructed through his contrast to the black man; and thus the liberation of the black man evokes a bottomless and nameless terror, because it means a reconstruction of white identity and it forces the white man to face himself and what's left of him after he is stripped from his artificial superiority.
Black characters in classic American novels have been just as marginalized as their real-life counterparts. The black "shadow" has, paradoxically, allowed white culture to face its fear of freedom. Though colonist, immigrant and refugee embraced America for its promise of freedom, they were nevertheless terrified at the prospect of becoming failures and outcasts, engulfed by a boundless, untamable nature. Africanism, the culture's construction of black slavery, stood, therefore, not only for the "not-free" but also for the "not-me."
2 The Literary Imagination
Toni Morrison makes it very clear that literature is a byproduct of the author's mind. In order to write, you have to have the capability of imagining first. Another important factor that shouldn't be ignored is the author's cultural upbringing and social standing. Readers and writers both struggle to interpret and perform within a common language sharing imaginative worlds. Through the author's presence, his intentions and (color)blindness are inherently part of the imaginative activity. Toni Morrison asks herself the question what happens then if most readers and writers (as it has been in American history) are white.
There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. This is a false assumption. The 400-year-old Africanist presence in America has not only influenced the white's sense of 'Americaness' but also the literary canon.
For both, black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language. The ways in which artists � and the society that bred them � transferred internal conflicts to a black darkness, to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies, is a major theme of American literature. Nothing highlighted freedom � if it did not in fact create it � like slavery.
3 Default-whiteness
"There is another person aboard, an alcoholic named Eddy. Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so." This is still a problem in modern literature. Unless otherwise specified, all characters are read and seen as white. The visibility of minority characters is something that needs to be worked on, however, we should preceed with caution. The most common problem we see today is that minority characters become token characters � their skin color/ sexuality/ religion being their only defining feature.
Personally, I think that there are many great ways of including diversity in a more 'organic' way, e.g. through the language the characters are usual or the inclusion of certain cultural practices. Nonetheless, it's still something that can be easily fucked up, and be turned into insensitive bullshit.
In conclusion
Toni Morrison's approach is not only meant to teach a black author about white motivation. It should also teach whites about how they have constructed not only black but white identity, and how they have contemplated their own humanity by observing the dehumanization of others. While I wish that these essays would have been more comprehensible, I still highly appreciate the ideas that Morrison provided, and would recommend Playing in the Dark to anyone interested in the subject matter and anyone willing to put in the needed time and effort.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a 1992 work of literary criticism by Toni Morrison.
In 1990, Morrison delivered a series of three lectures at Harvard University; she then adapted the texts to a 91-page book consisting of three essays of metacritical explorations into the operations of whiteness and blackness in the literature of white writers in the United States. Toni Morrison takes the position that the existing literary criticism in the United States has provided incomplete readings of its canonical literature by refusing to acknowledge and analyse the Africanist persona present in it.
Linda Krumholz described Morrison's project as "reread[ing] the American literary canon through an analysis of whiteness to propose the ways that black people were used to establish American identity."
Michael Eric Dyson observes that in addition to this exploration of the "white literary imagination...Playing in the Dark is also about a black intellectual seizing the interpretive space within a racially ordered hierarchy of cultural criticism. Blacks are usually represented through the lens of white perception rather than the other way around...With [Playing in the Dark], a substantial change is portended."
In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, making her one of the most-assigned of all female writers (which makes me very happy btw).
I have to admit that I did not fully understand the essay due to its academic nature and my lack of knowledge of Morrison's references. Since the target audience were students familiar with the topic and other professors, this is not surprising. However, I don't think that Morrison did a good job of providing useful and practical analytic tools for dissecting canonical literature. Her approach and her created categories were too abstract for that, nonetheless the food for thought she provided with this essay is invaluable.
I have a hard time reviewing this book (since I did have comprehension issues), so I think I will just give you a little insight into what I took from it:
1 The construction of white identity
Toni Morrison claims that white American fiction has fabricated a black persona that is "reflexive," a means for whites to contemplate their own terror and desire without having to acknowledge these feelings as their own.
Oftentimes, black characters function as surrogates to the white man's identity, thus ensuring that the white author and his characters know that they themselves are not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desireable; not helpess, but powerful.
It plays very well into the thoughts of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, that the white man's identity is constructed through his contrast to the black man; and thus the liberation of the black man evokes a bottomless and nameless terror, because it means a reconstruction of white identity and it forces the white man to face himself and what's left of him after he is stripped from his artificial superiority.
Black characters in classic American novels have been just as marginalized as their real-life counterparts. The black "shadow" has, paradoxically, allowed white culture to face its fear of freedom. Though colonist, immigrant and refugee embraced America for its promise of freedom, they were nevertheless terrified at the prospect of becoming failures and outcasts, engulfed by a boundless, untamable nature. Africanism, the culture's construction of black slavery, stood, therefore, not only for the "not-free" but also for the "not-me."
2 The Literary Imagination
Toni Morrison makes it very clear that literature is a byproduct of the author's mind. In order to write, you have to have the capability of imagining first. Another important factor that shouldn't be ignored is the author's cultural upbringing and social standing. Readers and writers both struggle to interpret and perform within a common language sharing imaginative worlds. Through the author's presence, his intentions and (color)blindness are inherently part of the imaginative activity. Toni Morrison asks herself the question what happens then if most readers and writers (as it has been in American history) are white.
There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. This is a false assumption. The 400-year-old Africanist presence in America has not only influenced the white's sense of 'Americaness' but also the literary canon.
For both, black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language. The ways in which artists � and the society that bred them � transferred internal conflicts to a black darkness, to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies, is a major theme of American literature. Nothing highlighted freedom � if it did not in fact create it � like slavery.
The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion: the act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.
3 Default-whiteness
"There is another person aboard, an alcoholic named Eddy. Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so." This is still a problem in modern literature. Unless otherwise specified, all characters are read and seen as white. The visibility of minority characters is something that needs to be worked on, however, we should preceed with caution. The most common problem we see today is that minority characters become token characters � their skin color/ sexuality/ religion being their only defining feature.
Personally, I think that there are many great ways of including diversity in a more 'organic' way, e.g. through the language the characters are usual or the inclusion of certain cultural practices. Nonetheless, it's still something that can be easily fucked up, and be turned into insensitive bullshit.
In conclusion
Toni Morrison's approach is not only meant to teach a black author about white motivation. It should also teach whites about how they have constructed not only black but white identity, and how they have contemplated their own humanity by observing the dehumanization of others. While I wish that these essays would have been more comprehensible, I still highly appreciate the ideas that Morrison provided, and would recommend Playing in the Dark to anyone interested in the subject matter and anyone willing to put in the needed time and effort.
August 21, 2018
I gave up on highlighting because everything Toni Morrison says is important.
February 13, 2020
”The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.�
In his 1978 study Orientalism, Edward Said argues that, in the process of inventing what they called "the Orient," European imperialists inadvertently invented themselves�"the West"—too. Toni Morrison's major argument in Playing in the Dark is similar and related: all American fiction, she suggests, is inflected and shaped by the rhetorical invention she calls "Africanism," the black otherness against which white identity and all its expressions are defined. No matter how much or little a particular white writer may wish to engage with matters of race, race is nevertheless present in the work, shaping everything from the thematic content to the language used to deliver it.
Playing in the Dark began life as a series of lectures delivered by Morrison in 1990, and, at under 100 pages, the paper version retains the brevity of an oral presentation. After a short introduction to the topic, most of the book consists of textual analyses of a handful of American novels: Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden, most thoroughly, but with momentary appearances by Poe, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and Styron, too. These fairly unpopular works by Cather and Hemingway may seem like odd points of emphasis, but Morrison has good reasons for choosing them. Firstly, it's important to her that we examine "minor" books as well as "major" ones, and recognize that obviously flawed works frequently reveal even more about their authors' fixations than their more successful output. And second, these particular novels represent two very different approaches to race by white authors: Cather attempts to address the reality of American slavery head-on, while in Hemingway race (at least in its nonwhite manifestations) is only ever a marginal concern. Both techniques, as you've likely predicted, turn out to be more revealing than their authors probably intended.
Few of the novelists Morrison scrutinizes come off looking very good, but then that's not actually the point. Morrison's intention isn't (as white people always fear whenever racial critiques are made of their favorite media) simply to decide what books are definitively "problematic" or which authors are capital-R Racists and then to dispose of them forever. On the contrary: her goal is to show us that—at least from a critical perspective�all books, even troubling or poorly-conceived ones, are worth engaging with precisely because of what the tell us about the racialized context in which they were written, and the methods by which their authors chose to grapple with the realities of a racist society. As a novelist herself Morrison understands and respects the work fiction writers do, and she sincerely believes in fiction as a means of inhabiting other perspectives and illuminating hidden truths. ("I am in awe," she says, perhaps by way of a reassurance to her white readers, "of Faulkner's Benjy, James's Maisie, Flaubert's Emma, Melville's Pip, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list.")
But it would also be wrong to downplay the real, radical work Morrison is doing here. As others have pointed out, this slender book is a deliberate act of reclamation: by reframing the works of canonical white writers and reading them through the same explicitly racialized lens we've always applied to writers of color, Morrison also claims these works for herself and others who have been shut out of the literary narrative. She rejects "colorblind" readings, which are really just a strategy for white people to avoid uncomfortable conversations about themselves and to cordon off their own artistic output as timeless and universal. She also challenges the ingrained assumption that whiteness is the default artistic and critical perspective, to be cherished and enforced but never discussed or critiqued. ("Eddy is white," she says of a character in To Have and Have Not, "and we know he is because nobody says so.")
These ideas may not sound particularly revolutionary 30 years post-publication, but I think it would be dishonest to claim that they're actually being put into practice on a wide scale. Sure we've gained (slightly) more diversity in publishing, but it's still rare that we apply the same racialized scrutiny to white writers as to their POC counterparts, unless their depictions of nonwhite characters are so egregiously offensive that we can commend ourselves for rejecting them (ahem, American Dirt). Whiteness itself is still not being examined in a meaningful way, because it is still subconsciously understood to be the norm.
The most important gift Morrison grants us in Playing in the Dark is sort of a critical toolbox for doing this work ourselves. Her close readings are the best parts of the book, combining the critical perception of a scholar (Morrison held an MA from Cornell) with a novelist's awareness of the craft. By flagging up some of the ways in which white authors do and don't talk about race, using everything from blatant color-based metaphors (think of all the philosophizing about the terrible whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick) to the actual construction of the sentences themselves (Morrison's got a memorable section about an especially wonky Hemingway sentence, though it would be hard to describe here), she primes us to look out for such indicators in our other reading, too. So far the only fiction I've read since finishing this has been Morrison's own Beloved, but I'm eager to apply her strategies to whatever white authors I read next.
My only real complaints with Playing in the Dark are that the prose can be a bit on the academic side (understandably, since these were academic lectures), and that the book isn't four times longer. I could happily read several hundred more pages along these lines, with Morrison insightfully critiquing the whole American canon with which she was obviously so familiar.
But that's not her priority here, nor is it her responsibility. This is an introduction, not an overview, and Morrison's self-assigned task is simply to start us thinking. Where we go from there is entirely up to us.
In his 1978 study Orientalism, Edward Said argues that, in the process of inventing what they called "the Orient," European imperialists inadvertently invented themselves�"the West"—too. Toni Morrison's major argument in Playing in the Dark is similar and related: all American fiction, she suggests, is inflected and shaped by the rhetorical invention she calls "Africanism," the black otherness against which white identity and all its expressions are defined. No matter how much or little a particular white writer may wish to engage with matters of race, race is nevertheless present in the work, shaping everything from the thematic content to the language used to deliver it.
Playing in the Dark began life as a series of lectures delivered by Morrison in 1990, and, at under 100 pages, the paper version retains the brevity of an oral presentation. After a short introduction to the topic, most of the book consists of textual analyses of a handful of American novels: Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden, most thoroughly, but with momentary appearances by Poe, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and Styron, too. These fairly unpopular works by Cather and Hemingway may seem like odd points of emphasis, but Morrison has good reasons for choosing them. Firstly, it's important to her that we examine "minor" books as well as "major" ones, and recognize that obviously flawed works frequently reveal even more about their authors' fixations than their more successful output. And second, these particular novels represent two very different approaches to race by white authors: Cather attempts to address the reality of American slavery head-on, while in Hemingway race (at least in its nonwhite manifestations) is only ever a marginal concern. Both techniques, as you've likely predicted, turn out to be more revealing than their authors probably intended.
Few of the novelists Morrison scrutinizes come off looking very good, but then that's not actually the point. Morrison's intention isn't (as white people always fear whenever racial critiques are made of their favorite media) simply to decide what books are definitively "problematic" or which authors are capital-R Racists and then to dispose of them forever. On the contrary: her goal is to show us that—at least from a critical perspective�all books, even troubling or poorly-conceived ones, are worth engaging with precisely because of what the tell us about the racialized context in which they were written, and the methods by which their authors chose to grapple with the realities of a racist society. As a novelist herself Morrison understands and respects the work fiction writers do, and she sincerely believes in fiction as a means of inhabiting other perspectives and illuminating hidden truths. ("I am in awe," she says, perhaps by way of a reassurance to her white readers, "of Faulkner's Benjy, James's Maisie, Flaubert's Emma, Melville's Pip, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list.")
But it would also be wrong to downplay the real, radical work Morrison is doing here. As others have pointed out, this slender book is a deliberate act of reclamation: by reframing the works of canonical white writers and reading them through the same explicitly racialized lens we've always applied to writers of color, Morrison also claims these works for herself and others who have been shut out of the literary narrative. She rejects "colorblind" readings, which are really just a strategy for white people to avoid uncomfortable conversations about themselves and to cordon off their own artistic output as timeless and universal. She also challenges the ingrained assumption that whiteness is the default artistic and critical perspective, to be cherished and enforced but never discussed or critiqued. ("Eddy is white," she says of a character in To Have and Have Not, "and we know he is because nobody says so.")
These ideas may not sound particularly revolutionary 30 years post-publication, but I think it would be dishonest to claim that they're actually being put into practice on a wide scale. Sure we've gained (slightly) more diversity in publishing, but it's still rare that we apply the same racialized scrutiny to white writers as to their POC counterparts, unless their depictions of nonwhite characters are so egregiously offensive that we can commend ourselves for rejecting them (ahem, American Dirt). Whiteness itself is still not being examined in a meaningful way, because it is still subconsciously understood to be the norm.
The most important gift Morrison grants us in Playing in the Dark is sort of a critical toolbox for doing this work ourselves. Her close readings are the best parts of the book, combining the critical perception of a scholar (Morrison held an MA from Cornell) with a novelist's awareness of the craft. By flagging up some of the ways in which white authors do and don't talk about race, using everything from blatant color-based metaphors (think of all the philosophizing about the terrible whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick) to the actual construction of the sentences themselves (Morrison's got a memorable section about an especially wonky Hemingway sentence, though it would be hard to describe here), she primes us to look out for such indicators in our other reading, too. So far the only fiction I've read since finishing this has been Morrison's own Beloved, but I'm eager to apply her strategies to whatever white authors I read next.
My only real complaints with Playing in the Dark are that the prose can be a bit on the academic side (understandably, since these were academic lectures), and that the book isn't four times longer. I could happily read several hundred more pages along these lines, with Morrison insightfully critiquing the whole American canon with which she was obviously so familiar.
But that's not her priority here, nor is it her responsibility. This is an introduction, not an overview, and Morrison's self-assigned task is simply to start us thinking. Where we go from there is entirely up to us.
August 10, 2019
Jordan Elgrably: "Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly and convincingly?"
:"...I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare." -
This is a short but important book that looks at how white writers in the United States wrote about Black people from the 19th to middle of the 20th century.If any book deserves an updated edition to it, this is the book (See and . Toni Morrison, coming off of one of the most triumphant stages in any literary career, takes a series of lectures and transcribes them to book form. She uses a select set of white writers and breaks down the different ways Whites have used Black people in their narratives and purposes this book as an introduction to further looking at literary criticism concerning the "Africanist presence."
Though the writers Poe, Melville, Faulkner, and Twain are discussed, the main authors being analyzed are and . She looks at Cather's last novel as well as two Hemingway stories: and . To Have and Have Not was of particular interest to me because though I have never read it, I have seen the movie version with an adapted screenplay by . I would like to a detailed comparison of those stories one day.
I picked this book up because of my interest in reading about race and literary criticism and suggest that if you have similar interest, to do the same.
:"...I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare." -
This is a short but important book that looks at how white writers in the United States wrote about Black people from the 19th to middle of the 20th century.
Though the writers Poe, Melville, Faulkner, and Twain are discussed, the main authors being analyzed are and . She looks at Cather's last novel as well as two Hemingway stories: and . To Have and Have Not was of particular interest to me because though I have never read it, I have seen the movie version with an adapted screenplay by . I would like to a detailed comparison of those stories one day.
I picked this book up because of my interest in reading about race and literary criticism and suggest that if you have similar interest, to do the same.
March 3, 2021
In this seminal work, Toni Morrison puts out the call for a revaluation of American literature, to recognize its use of the African-American presence, as well as its impact. She uses examples from Poe, Mark Twain, Cather, and, most extensively, Hemingway to illustrate the different ways this ever-present, mostly silent, presence has been employed, whether it be for metaphor or to enrich the main white character’s development.
Even describing such a short work, my words are inadequate. If you’re interested in the topic, it’d be best to read hers.
Morrison illuminates these ideas to, arguably, even greater effect in other speeches, including a brilliant meditation on Melville, collected in .
Even describing such a short work, my words are inadequate. If you’re interested in the topic, it’d be best to read hers.
Morrison illuminates these ideas to, arguably, even greater effect in other speeches, including a brilliant meditation on Melville, collected in .
May 16, 2019
Leggendo le prime pagine di questo straordinario libro mi è venuto in mente altro, sarà per la famosa teoria dei vasi comunicanti che la parola scritta sovente richiama(in realtà non credo, ma non vedevo l'ora di poter scrivere "vasi comunicanti" da qualche parte, è più comodo scriverlo qui che sulla facciata di un palazzo), mi è venuto da pensare alla comune rappresentazione iconografica dei musicisti jazz, la classica foto rigorosamente in bianco e nero che da più di mezzo secolo associamo automaticamente all'atto del suonare jazz. La musica jazz vive in un mondo codificato solo da due (non)colori. Anche oggi, nonostante digitale e photoshop, l'unica rappresentazione che in quelche modo autocertifichi autenticità a un jazzista è figlia di quel misto di romanticismo, limiti tecnologici e soprattutto contrasto tra lo spot bianco delle luci di un palco o di uno studio e la pelle (quasi sempre nera) di un musicista ( col tempo quel bianco e nero basico della faccia di Billie Holliday che emerge dal nero dello sfondo - da un nero puro e fitto emerge un nero schiarito dalla luce - incontrerà tutte le varianti che le tecnologie e i supporti permetteranno: contrasto accentuato, sgranatura, movimento ecc..). Ho sempre trovato questa rappresentazione un involontario e leggero atto di razzismo. Un insieme di sterotipi condiviso da chi scatta la foto (generalmente un bianco) e chi la guarda (spesso anch'esso bianco). Tutto quel nero esalta una identità attraverso il suo contrario, il bianco (la luce bianca), apparentemnte assente, e genera uno stereotipo culturale e razziale (solo ai musicisti classici,a quelli rock, alle popstar per ragazzine è permesso di vivere in un mondo a colori - e anche qui si potrebbero analizzare mille varianze quando costoro vengono ritratti in bianco e nero, il bianco e nero dettagliato e senza grana del musicista classico o il bianco e nero sporco e di maniera degli scatti della prima scena punk: "Jimi Hendrix was a nigger/Jesus Christ and Grandma, too/Jackson Pollock was a nigger/Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger ecc..,": il doppio salto mortale carpiato degli stereotipi culturali della signorina Patti Smith. Ma ci allontaneremmo troppo dalle tesi di Toni Morrison). Perché mi è venuto in mente tutto questo leggendo le prime righe di un saggio - una raccolta di tre lezioni universitarie in realtà - che tratta di altro, di letteratura e di razza (uso questo termine odioso perchè la Morrison non ancorata ai legacci della lingua neutra e corretta di noi visi pallidi civilizzati, postilluministi e denazistificati lo utilizza a piene mani)? Perché il colore bianco, l'assenza, quello che non si vede ma illumina sono elementi importanti della sue dissertazioni, ma ci torneremo dopo, e soprattutto perchè il libro inizia proprio con un concerto jazz. Nell'introduzione Toni Morrison ci racconta di un'altra scrittrice, Marie Cardinal, che assistendo a un concerto di Louis Amstrong viene colta da un forte attacco di panico che scoprirà essere il sintomo di una depressione che l'accompagnerà tutta la vita - una malattia bianca e borghese che viene disvelata casualmente dall'"altro" : un musicita nero (Morrison scriverebbe negro) e da dei ritmi sincopati. Da questo fragile appiglio si parte per una dotta, avvincente, rigorosa rilettura dei miti fondativi della letteratura americana alla luce dell'ingombrante assenza dell'elemento afroamericano. Non è una rilettura a tesi, ad armi spianate, un muro contro muro, ma un riordino degli elementi simbolici e reali della cultura americana alla luce di questa supposta assenza (un po' il contrario delle foto dei musicisti jazz: un enorme spot di luce nera a congealare il bianco della cultura americana). Attraverso il classico metodo dell'analisi testuale vengono rilette le opere di alcuni scrittori totem dei caratteri culturali nazionali (individualismo, virilità, sesso, democrazia ecc...) - Poe, Twain, Melville, Faulkner, James, Hemingway - non tanto per individuare gli scontati stereotipi (anche se con Hemingway, verso cui l'autrice sembra nutrire una profonda antipatia, si sfoga molto in questo senso) quanto per rimarcare come quell'assenza, quel contrasto taciuto sia l'elemento propulsore di quei miti fondativi. Un punto di vista in parte inedito illuminato dal pensiero rigoroso e mai banale, dalla cultura e dalla voce unica di una delle più grandi scrittrici americane (ma lei direbbe afroamericane). Imperdibile.
June 26, 2017
[T]he habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and scholarly moeurs (which functions smoothly in literary criticism, but neither makes nor receives credible claims in other disciplines) that has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access to remarkable insights in their works.One's art of reading is not set in stone. It is a case in point I rely heavily upon. My guaranteed reviewing, the reiterating reviews I pile one on top of the other in the same work space, my keeping in play them all no matter how the years have shifted and cast a disparaging gaze on what I now know to be effort both half-hearted and pandering. Situation has much to do with it, for there is a broad span of difference between the past self which rejected out of fear of rejection and the current self which will take on any and all, confident in an inherent ability to thrive. In my reactions to works, I have been conniving, desperate for attention, petty, defensive, obstinate, and conscientiously inflammatory, and only I am the credible witness when it comes to determining which falls under which. Not being a saint, it is the best way of carving out an ethical space that I know, for internal shame is nothing compared to taking the next step in the journey towards critical, holistic, and fearless insight. Lack of fear, mind you, does not translate to lack of respect. I've more a revolutionary tendency in mind.
Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer.Marxist critique, LGBT critique, postcolonial critique. The only thing stopping one from engaging with the world of flesh and blood is their consignment of parts of it as a dream of a dreamer. Literature characterized as canonical texts of the United States coexisted far longer with the presence of slavery than without. Avoiding this majority is the lesser of the two evils only when one is a child, when ethics pale besides the intrigue of rockets and castles and everything not laid out as an explicit 'no' by the parent is imbibed as a conditional 'yes'. What concerns is not the dream, but those who still dream it. What concerns is not censorship or the ableism hooked into deriding of trigger warnings (go on and ignore the contentions of red means stop and green means go and see how far you get in your physical conception of free will) but the historical, sexual, psychological, social, and ideological reckonings that fueled these metaphors, these symbols, this creativity fueled by one of the most literal sorts of Other. One cannot take heritage piecemeal in the hierarchy that is academia and expect their analysis to bear fruit twenty, ten, a mere year after the publication springs and the beast turns over to a more comfortable side. If a text is to survive the onslaught of the millennia, it is to survive with all its faculties, for one can hardly learn how to avoid using flesh and blood as blank canvas if one avoids the canon of the methodology. Do you really think you remain without cannibal tendencies by your own will and effort?
A power, a sense of freedom, he had not known before. But what had he known before? Fine education, London sophistication, theological and scientific thought. None of these, one gathers, could provide him with the authority and autonomy that Mississippi planter life did. Also this sense is understood to be a force that flows, already present and ready to spill out of his "absolute control over the lives of others." This force is not a willed domination, a thought-o0ut, calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, a Niagara Falls waiting to drench Dunbar as soon as he is in position to assume absolute control.Read ableist texts if you are physically whole or sane. Read homophobic texts if you are straight. Read anti-black texts if you're not black, for your gift is to not have a stake in the matter that has direct bearing on your right to self-care and avoidance of mutilation. All that matters is that you pay attention, and when you do, say exactly what you attend to. Look at the associations of an entire group of people with all the evils of the world. Break them down. Analyze the histories that enabled such fictional infliction of meaning, and look at the lines those famous writers drew for themselves out of wrestling with self-reflexive agony. Morality's no excuse when there's critical insight to be had, when the matter is not of guilt or mirrored bigotry but how far this text of humanity can go in succeeding generations, those that walk with books open and minds unafraid of seeing themselves in the void. I've said before that evaluating stereotypes is part and parcel of my toolkit, not a determination of dichotomy. That, of course, is with regards to the dream. There's nothing subjective about my extinction at the hands of the dreamer.
As for the culture, the imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed is in large measure shaped by the presence of the racial other. Statements to the contrary, insisting on the meaninglessness of race to the American identity, are themselves full of meaning. The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.
September 27, 2015
Indispensable. Morrison's case about the production of whiteness through various operations of othering and exploitation of blackness will remind readers of Said's case about the creation of 'European' in/through the production of otherness as Orientalism. The discussion of surrogacy -- the way (white, white-positioned) readers are stimulated and gratified with tales of suffering and violence and simultaneously protected from them by the author's deployment of black characters as surrogates (upon whom are inflicted the real agonies), while the sort of enriched experience and wisdom thus derived, as well as victimhood, are somehow transferred to the white characters -- is something that, once read, a reader sees manifest in imperial core narratives everywhere, in movies, tv, and especially pulp fiction. The loathesome tv show The Wire springs to mind, where the white cop hero McNulty is made deeper and more complex, and effectively transformed into a victim himself, by watching pityingly/understandingly/interestedly as the young black men (D'Angelo, Bodie) he tries to save are murdered. The show enlarges and dramatizes his heroic grief while it trivilizes and exploits for thrills the actual killings of the show's black stars that are the substance of his 'character'; Morrison's monograph clarifies this for us, placing this so strange and yet so commonplace fictional operation in a long tradtion and at the core of the production of white supremacy. All the pathos of those on screen murders, the danger and the suffering they depict, somehow accrues to the white hero who is safeguarded, by this perpetual reproduction of white supremacy that Morrison exposes in the most elite rank of American lit, the founts and keystones of white American culture. One finds the analogue in British fiction, often with other Others (the Irish scabs and English mill workers, for example, in Gaskell's North and South, whose suffering is expropriated by the genteel + bourgeois English heroine and hero, allow the reader to experience rich, deep, difficult emotions while the hero and heroine, with whom the readers are in solidarity, escape the worst.) I read this book years ago, when it was newly released, and I continue to see its insights validated and its method proven indispensable all the time, for the canon, for the pulp of the past, and unfortunately even more often for current culture products.
November 10, 2016
I do not seem to be in the right mind to review this now. Re-read required.
March 17, 2008
If only all literary criticism and theory were as well-written, clear, and concise as 's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Morrison's central argument in this book is a fairly simple one, that "the contemplation of this black presence [in American history and literature:] is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination" (5). She dedicates herself in this book to exploring the ways in which blackness is used within traditional, canonical (in other words, white) American literature, the ways in which it is always present, even when it is not acknowledged.
She names the set of relations and representations that she studies here American Africanism and describes it as "an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served" (6).
In the first essay in this book, "Black Matters," she focuses on exploring the reasons behind the omission of American Africanism in literary discourse and, in doing so, presents arguments for the necessity of repairing this omission. One such argument is that "the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim--of always defining it assymetrically [sic:] from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes"--does not address the complete range of problems that accompany racism (or racialism). In addition to studying the impact of racism on the victims, we must also study "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it" (11). Looking at the place of blackness in white literature will help with this project.
She also addresses the idea that art is human, universal, and, ideally, apolitical, contending that " criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist" (12). Race (like gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) will always be a part of a living literature. Sometimes it will be at the heart of a work of literature and sometimes it won't, but as long as we humans think in terms of racial categories, it will be present in some way. So to pretend that it is not present, that it does not color our representations and modes of storytelling, is to rob literature of some of its meaning.
In the second essay of the book, "Romancing the Shadow," Morrison discusses Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in order to examine the use of whiteness in conjunction with blackness (as occurs, for instance, at the end of Poe's novel, as well as in Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway, all acknowledged giants of American literature). She writes, "These images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness--a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing" (33). If the American dream is to be free and the immigrant's dream of American is to have a clean slate on which to begin again, Morrison argues that the black bodies of slaves provided a counterpoint to these dreams, something against which to more clearly define those dreams. It is something that cannot be explicitly acknowledged, but it is something that permeates American literature and ideology. She writes, "It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity" (44). She concludes this essay by writing, "If we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable--all of the self-contradictory features of the self. Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say" (59).
In the third and final essay, "Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks," Morrison attempts "to observe and trace the transformation of American Africanism from its simplistic, though menacing, purposes of establishing hierarchic difference [as described in "Romancing the Shadow":] to its surrogate properties as self-reflexive meditations on the loss of difference, to its lush and fully blossomed existence in the rhetoric of dread and desire" (63-4). She also re-states her purpose in writing this book: "Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanist presence and personae have been constructed--invented--in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served. . . . My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served" (90).
Since the publication of this book in 1992, the field of literary studies has actually opened up in this direction. Critical studies of whiteness and its construction have flourished, which prevents the racial subject, the describers and imaginers, from remaining invisible and unmarked and which also thereby makes it possible to imagine and create a world (both fictional and real) in which people of color are not limited to being the Other and are not the only people imagined to be affected by racism.
She names the set of relations and representations that she studies here American Africanism and describes it as "an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served" (6).
In the first essay in this book, "Black Matters," she focuses on exploring the reasons behind the omission of American Africanism in literary discourse and, in doing so, presents arguments for the necessity of repairing this omission. One such argument is that "the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim--of always defining it assymetrically [sic:] from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes"--does not address the complete range of problems that accompany racism (or racialism). In addition to studying the impact of racism on the victims, we must also study "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it" (11). Looking at the place of blackness in white literature will help with this project.
She also addresses the idea that art is human, universal, and, ideally, apolitical, contending that " criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist" (12). Race (like gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) will always be a part of a living literature. Sometimes it will be at the heart of a work of literature and sometimes it won't, but as long as we humans think in terms of racial categories, it will be present in some way. So to pretend that it is not present, that it does not color our representations and modes of storytelling, is to rob literature of some of its meaning.
In the second essay of the book, "Romancing the Shadow," Morrison discusses Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in order to examine the use of whiteness in conjunction with blackness (as occurs, for instance, at the end of Poe's novel, as well as in Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway, all acknowledged giants of American literature). She writes, "These images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness--a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing" (33). If the American dream is to be free and the immigrant's dream of American is to have a clean slate on which to begin again, Morrison argues that the black bodies of slaves provided a counterpoint to these dreams, something against which to more clearly define those dreams. It is something that cannot be explicitly acknowledged, but it is something that permeates American literature and ideology. She writes, "It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity" (44). She concludes this essay by writing, "If we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable--all of the self-contradictory features of the self. Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say" (59).
In the third and final essay, "Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks," Morrison attempts "to observe and trace the transformation of American Africanism from its simplistic, though menacing, purposes of establishing hierarchic difference [as described in "Romancing the Shadow":] to its surrogate properties as self-reflexive meditations on the loss of difference, to its lush and fully blossomed existence in the rhetoric of dread and desire" (63-4). She also re-states her purpose in writing this book: "Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanist presence and personae have been constructed--invented--in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served. . . . My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served" (90).
Since the publication of this book in 1992, the field of literary studies has actually opened up in this direction. Critical studies of whiteness and its construction have flourished, which prevents the racial subject, the describers and imaginers, from remaining invisible and unmarked and which also thereby makes it possible to imagine and create a world (both fictional and real) in which people of color are not limited to being the Other and are not the only people imagined to be affected by racism.
November 13, 2010
I should confess that Morrison will never get a flat-out criticism from this reviewer. I'm a bit of a fanatic, a would-be groupie. Read this one, my first experience with Morrison's non-fiction, for a paper I'm working on--incidentally, on "Beloved" (and tangentially, Faulkner's "Light in August"). Morrison's wry, crisp style is of course on form. The argument is, unsurprisingly, provocative and very astute. I'm particularly intrigued by her notion of the 'invisible presence' of Africanism throughout the history of American literature. As she remarks, even where this presence is (seemingly) not, it is. That she persuasively reminds us of the inextricable relation between constructions of American whiteness/maleness and the history of slavery in this country is to her great credit, to my mind.
I give it three stars, though, perhaps because I feel like I've heard it before; I've heard it after; I've heard it done better, in many ways. This is good because it's Morrison, not because it is a book of race theory. Her readings of Cather, Melville, and Hemingway are spot-on; nonetheless (and perhaps this is by virtue of this being based on a series of lectures Morrison gave), it feels to some extent undercooked. I wanted her to go on and on, to delve further in, to provide more fodder for us to play with. It's an outline--a very beautiful and powerful outline, but nonetheless, it lacks the shading I was hoping to get. Worthwhile, of course, if you like Morrison or if you'd like to ease in to some critical race theory. It's a seductive and accessible text.
**upon re-reading**
I remain more or less in the same place with this book as with my first reading. As a literary critic (which she doesn't proclaim herself to be, though that's the apparent categorization of this book), Morrison does a number of surface readings that I wouldn't get away with in one of my graduate seminars. Her basic project is powerful; beautiful; necessary. But the execution lacks, and say what you will--she's writing as a writer and a reader, this is a series of lectures, &co&co--I think she takes a few too many liberties. Why use close readings if you aren't going to do them "right"? And as for the lecture argument--so was Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and I think that text simply holds up to textual analysis better than this one does.
I do appreciate it as part of larger critical race theory tradition, but I worry that this will be held up as the model, simply because Morrison wields a great deal of cultural capital. Unfortunately, I think her critiques of racialism in America are much more nuanced and deeply felt in her novels than in this book. Still worth a read--just don't go into it believing it to be the be-all-end-all of race theory.
I give it three stars, though, perhaps because I feel like I've heard it before; I've heard it after; I've heard it done better, in many ways. This is good because it's Morrison, not because it is a book of race theory. Her readings of Cather, Melville, and Hemingway are spot-on; nonetheless (and perhaps this is by virtue of this being based on a series of lectures Morrison gave), it feels to some extent undercooked. I wanted her to go on and on, to delve further in, to provide more fodder for us to play with. It's an outline--a very beautiful and powerful outline, but nonetheless, it lacks the shading I was hoping to get. Worthwhile, of course, if you like Morrison or if you'd like to ease in to some critical race theory. It's a seductive and accessible text.
**upon re-reading**
I remain more or less in the same place with this book as with my first reading. As a literary critic (which she doesn't proclaim herself to be, though that's the apparent categorization of this book), Morrison does a number of surface readings that I wouldn't get away with in one of my graduate seminars. Her basic project is powerful; beautiful; necessary. But the execution lacks, and say what you will--she's writing as a writer and a reader, this is a series of lectures, &co&co--I think she takes a few too many liberties. Why use close readings if you aren't going to do them "right"? And as for the lecture argument--so was Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and I think that text simply holds up to textual analysis better than this one does.
I do appreciate it as part of larger critical race theory tradition, but I worry that this will be held up as the model, simply because Morrison wields a great deal of cultural capital. Unfortunately, I think her critiques of racialism in America are much more nuanced and deeply felt in her novels than in this book. Still worth a read--just don't go into it believing it to be the be-all-end-all of race theory.
August 9, 2019
Diese Essays handeln von Imaginationen von Schwarzen in der Literatur von Weißen (unter anderem bei Mark Twain, E. A. Poe, Henry James, Hemingway). Es geht Morrison weniger um die Beschreibung von Afrikanern/Afroamerikanern sondern um den Umgang des weißen Autors mit diesem Thema. Sehr einleuchtend ist der Vergleich mit den Frauen in der Literatur; auch hier haben sich die Blickwinkel der Literaturwissenschaft nur allmählich gewandelt. Beim Lesen habe ich mich gefragt, wie die Präsidentschaft von Obama wohl neue Denkweisen ermöglichen wird.
Read
February 7, 2017This was a short but very incisive read. Hard to believe it's from 1992, it still comes across as current. Very important points, very well put. I am sad that her argument about how oppression is investigated heavily asymmetrically, focusing on the oppressed and not the oppressor, still does not read as dated. I mean now there are whiteness studies, etc. but I personally feel there's not as much investigation as there should be, and also the results often do not make it into public consciousness or even into activist discourse...? It's telling how I've read so many of her books, but had no idea this one existed.
My only issue was that sometimes she mentioned Native people in passing but did not elaborate, even when I felt it would have been very relevant to elaborate. And I was confused when she seemed to imply the character of Tonto was Black? She didn't say that outright, but implied it so heavily that if I hadn't known Tonto was Native, that's certainly not how I would have read those passages.
Source: Lawrence Public Library (January monthly challenge recommendations shelf :) )
My only issue was that sometimes she mentioned Native people in passing but did not elaborate, even when I felt it would have been very relevant to elaborate. And I was confused when she seemed to imply the character of Tonto was Black? She didn't say that outright, but implied it so heavily that if I hadn't known Tonto was Native, that's certainly not how I would have read those passages.
Source: Lawrence Public Library (January monthly challenge recommendations shelf :) )
February 7, 2024
“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.�
� Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
This book is essentially three lectures Toni Morrison gave at Harvard University (the William E Massey Sr. Lectures) on how race, the black body, and the presence and even absence (hint: there is no REAL absence) have impacted American literature. The essays begin by exploring how this "black presence" is central to any understanding of our national literature.
"These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature--individualism, masculinity, social engagement vs historical isolation,; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist* presence."
Our literature does this through codes and restrictions, contradictions, conflicts, so that even when a real Africanist presence is found in certain works of American fiction, it is used to prop up the idea of whiteness.
Morrison busts out some Hegelian synthesis, suggesting that replacing one hierarchy of literary criticism (Thesis::Eurocentric) with another (Antithesis::African-American Criticism) still leaves a lot of literary rooms unexplored. She isn't just interested in how America's primary conflict not only impacted the victim/the objects of racist policy and attitudes (and what kinda impact racism had on those who perpetrated), she is proposing examining "the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblack [writers] who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions."
In these essays/lectures she explores Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, & Ernest Hemingway.
I read this short book today. It took me only a few hours, but it really made me miss Toni Morrison. I can't imagine her response to the moral panic CRT has caused among a large segment of the American Experiment. A lot of what she wrote seemed both more hopeful than our current course anticipates, but also quite prophetic of the power that the blackness has achieved in helping white writers (and certainly politicians) to write their fiction, both good and bad.
* Morrison has her own working definition for these essays regarding Africanist. For her Africanist is an easy short-hand for American culture's understanding of the dark other, not only for the "not-free" but also the "not-me." A figure that haunts not just our history and our politics but our stories, our myths, and our understanding of ourselves.
� Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
This book is essentially three lectures Toni Morrison gave at Harvard University (the William E Massey Sr. Lectures) on how race, the black body, and the presence and even absence (hint: there is no REAL absence) have impacted American literature. The essays begin by exploring how this "black presence" is central to any understanding of our national literature.
"These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature--individualism, masculinity, social engagement vs historical isolation,; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist* presence."
Our literature does this through codes and restrictions, contradictions, conflicts, so that even when a real Africanist presence is found in certain works of American fiction, it is used to prop up the idea of whiteness.
Morrison busts out some Hegelian synthesis, suggesting that replacing one hierarchy of literary criticism (Thesis::Eurocentric) with another (Antithesis::African-American Criticism) still leaves a lot of literary rooms unexplored. She isn't just interested in how America's primary conflict not only impacted the victim/the objects of racist policy and attitudes (and what kinda impact racism had on those who perpetrated), she is proposing examining "the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblack [writers] who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions."
In these essays/lectures she explores Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, & Ernest Hemingway.
I read this short book today. It took me only a few hours, but it really made me miss Toni Morrison. I can't imagine her response to the moral panic CRT has caused among a large segment of the American Experiment. A lot of what she wrote seemed both more hopeful than our current course anticipates, but also quite prophetic of the power that the blackness has achieved in helping white writers (and certainly politicians) to write their fiction, both good and bad.
* Morrison has her own working definition for these essays regarding Africanist. For her Africanist is an easy short-hand for American culture's understanding of the dark other, not only for the "not-free" but also the "not-me." A figure that haunts not just our history and our politics but our stories, our myths, and our understanding of ourselves.
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May 8, 2020A reminder of why I avoided literature classes.
December 2, 2022
"The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise."
In this stunning monograph, Morrison indirectly echoes Derrida by forwarding that Blackness is akin to an absent(ed) presence in the collective consciousness of the country. As Black people have been there since the start, the encounter with them has irrevocably shaped all aspects of life. Literature isn't exempt also. "The fabrication of an Africanist persona, she says, "is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious... It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity." She tries to unravel it.
Through readings of work by Poe, Hemingway, Cather, and Melville—among others—she seeks to show how the white imagination has always accounted for Black presence, revealing itself in the process. Africa and Blackness become a blank canvas for projecting their fantasies and fears as well as laying claim to knowledge and selfhood. These crop up in interesting ways in the text and its subtext where meaning is able to escape the writer. So, African Americanism goes from "establishing hierarchical difference to self-reflexive meditations on the loss of this difference, to the rhetoric of dread and desire."
September 13, 2020
A brilliant exploration of African American cultural identities formed by America literature that portray black narratives in stereotypes and silencing that become a romantic white conquering that shows "heroism, virility, and the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others." Her criticisms of Cather, Twain, and Hemingway are memorable. A quick read. I listened to the audiobook and would like to read it.
September 6, 2007
OK, what I don't like about Morrison's critical work is that it ignores the reality of First Peoples and our presence in literature.
November 4, 2016
A very interesting and much needed approach towards analyzing American Literature. Recommend!
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December 27, 201580. Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
1992, 100 page hardcover
read Dec 9-12
These essays are work but also enlightening if you can manage to fight your way through them. Morrison is so angry and yet she never tells you, never expresses it in any overt way. But she lays it in raw when one compares the balanced tone and the emotion that almost logically is underneath. She writes objectively, ”Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities.� - if you aren't cringing, read that again.
From there she just goes on to talk about it. I found myself so uncomfortable reading this, that it became a hard read. If I could have stayed on her tone, it would just been a somewhat interesting, boring and yet very informative read. Yet, that’s not where she is going. She says it, and you think that’s extreme and then eventually you come around to see how much racism plays such a fundamental unconscious and key a roll in American story telling, and how universal it is. It's like the message sinks in and a knife twists in your gut
Think again about Finn in The Force Awakens. Go see any American movie and look at the roll the black characters play - but these servile roles are child’s play. In serious literature blacks play critical roles in balancing main, non-black characters. They provide a critical sense of freedom and independence to those characters. Morrison brings up Henry James, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O’Connor (a bit more respectfully), Mark Twain’s Jim, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willian Styron, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Edgar Allen Poe, Willa Cather’s , Melville’s Pip, and she hammers Hemingway. Melville was actually conscious about his racial play, using race in an exploratory and creative manner. Certainly he’s comes across as more modern in his sensibilities in this aspect than all these other authors, and most literature coming out today.
Perhaps I should go back and tone this one down. This reviews seems a bit discouraging. But it is an uncomfortable read, with some uncomfortable revelations that you thought you already knew, but really you only knew a small piece of it.
“As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.�
1992, 100 page hardcover
read Dec 9-12
These essays are work but also enlightening if you can manage to fight your way through them. Morrison is so angry and yet she never tells you, never expresses it in any overt way. But she lays it in raw when one compares the balanced tone and the emotion that almost logically is underneath. She writes objectively, ”Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities.� - if you aren't cringing, read that again.
From there she just goes on to talk about it. I found myself so uncomfortable reading this, that it became a hard read. If I could have stayed on her tone, it would just been a somewhat interesting, boring and yet very informative read. Yet, that’s not where she is going. She says it, and you think that’s extreme and then eventually you come around to see how much racism plays such a fundamental unconscious and key a roll in American story telling, and how universal it is. It's like the message sinks in and a knife twists in your gut
Think again about Finn in The Force Awakens. Go see any American movie and look at the roll the black characters play - but these servile roles are child’s play. In serious literature blacks play critical roles in balancing main, non-black characters. They provide a critical sense of freedom and independence to those characters. Morrison brings up Henry James, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Flannery O’Connor (a bit more respectfully), Mark Twain’s Jim, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willian Styron, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Edgar Allen Poe, Willa Cather’s , Melville’s Pip, and she hammers Hemingway. Melville was actually conscious about his racial play, using race in an exploratory and creative manner. Certainly he’s comes across as more modern in his sensibilities in this aspect than all these other authors, and most literature coming out today.
Perhaps I should go back and tone this one down. This reviews seems a bit discouraging. But it is an uncomfortable read, with some uncomfortable revelations that you thought you already knew, but really you only knew a small piece of it.
“As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.�
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December 1, 2024[Academic text] [Lectures in American Identity and Literary Criticism]
�
Related works: Edward Said’s Orientalism
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison gives us a critique of how race operates as a social construct in American literature. She argues that race is not merely an individual characteristic but a system through which societal values, judgments, and hierarchies are formed. Over centuries, associations such as fear, desire, and repulsion have been projected onto African Americans, not only defining Blackness but also serving as a counterpoint against which Whiteness is constructed. These projections, Morrison contends, function as a mirror, reflecting and defining White America’s sense of self, drawing boundaries of superiority and unity.
Something I found relevant even in our current cultural landscape, is how Morrison critiques the conventional practice of avoiding discussions of race, which, though often intended as a "polite" gesture, prevents the essential conversations needed to confront and dismantle deep-rooted racism. In her analysis, she reveals that African Americans are not just present in American literature but are integral to the formation of American identity itself. While European nations had long-established identities, the United States was uniquely formed in part through the institution of slavery. The very notion of Whiteness in America was consolidated through the shared denial of Blackness, a division that became foundational in defining what it meant to be American.
Morrison takes us on a tour of stories by United States authors to illustrate her points. As Morrison explores American literature, she demonstrates that racial dynamics are more complex than simple portrayals of Black inferiority. White writers project not only fear, dread, and contempt onto African American characters but also desire and fascination. Historically for many white authors, Blackness in American literature is entangled with the unknown, the irrational, and the primitive, while Whiteness is associated with knowledge, reason, and civilization. These literary constructions, Morrison argues, are integral to shaping national identity, revealing hidden structures of race, power, and privilege at the heart of American culture.
In a series of three essays, Playing in the Dark dismantles the illusion of American literature as raceless or universal, revealing how these white American authors � figures like Melville, Poe, and Hemingway � relied on Blackness as a crucial construct: a mixed projection of fear, desire, and primitivism that served to define and elevate whiteness. This "Africanist presence," as Morrison terms it, is not peripheral but central, shaping the cultural identity of America itself.
Morrison's critique draws on a rich tapestry of intellectual traditions, situating her work alongside thinkers like Palestinian post-colonialist theorist Edward Said and French philosopher Michel Foucault. Much like Said’s , which shows how Western literature constructs the Orient as a foil to define itself, Morrison demonstrates how American authors conjured Blackness to consolidate a national identity rooted in whiteness. Echoing Foucault in , she shows how racial categories, far from being inherent, are socially constructed through discourse� embedded in literature as both a reflection and reinforcement of power. The parallels to other key thinkers deepen her argument that American literature does not merely reflect a racialized society but actively produces and sustains its hierarchies.
Morrison’s assertions here draw parallels to Frantz Fanon’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness� from , unpacking how in literature, white writers project their internal conflicts and societal anxieties onto Black characters. In these types of stories, Blackness becomes a symbol for the aforementioned irrational, the unknown, and the primitive � qualities that, in turn, allow whiteness to define itself as the embodiment of reason, knowledge, and civilization. Through this lens, Morrison (much like Said with his contrapuntal reading), argues that the construction of Blackness not only reflects the anxieties of whiteness but actually reveals the very mechanisms that sustain it.
Despite its brevity, Playing in the Dark has stood the test of time as a cornerstone of literary and cultural studies, and with that has of course come both admiration and debate. Critics have questioned its omission of figures like Said by name, or the relative scarcity of detailed textual evidence, yet its influence remains undeniable, standing alongside works like Said’s and Judith Butler’s as a paradigm-shifting critique.
What makes Morrison’s argument so enduring is its insistence on relationality. Whiteness, she argues, is not an unmarked universal but a category defined through its opposition to nonwhite “others� and “otherness.� This claim unsettles long-held critical norms, which often treated race as incidental or irrelevant to the major figures of the American literary canon. Morrison’s work demands that we confront the cultural mechanisms by which literature shapes and sustains national identity.
In the end, Playing in the Dark is not just a critique but an invitation to reckon with the unseen forces that shape American literature and, by extension, American identity. Morrison had an unwavering belief in the power of literature to illuminate and transform our cultural understanding, and her foray into academic, cultural critique is based on this fundamental belief that our awareness has the power to reshape how we read, write, and imagine the stories that define us.
�
Related works: Edward Said’s Orientalism
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison gives us a critique of how race operates as a social construct in American literature. She argues that race is not merely an individual characteristic but a system through which societal values, judgments, and hierarchies are formed. Over centuries, associations such as fear, desire, and repulsion have been projected onto African Americans, not only defining Blackness but also serving as a counterpoint against which Whiteness is constructed. These projections, Morrison contends, function as a mirror, reflecting and defining White America’s sense of self, drawing boundaries of superiority and unity.
Something I found relevant even in our current cultural landscape, is how Morrison critiques the conventional practice of avoiding discussions of race, which, though often intended as a "polite" gesture, prevents the essential conversations needed to confront and dismantle deep-rooted racism. In her analysis, she reveals that African Americans are not just present in American literature but are integral to the formation of American identity itself. While European nations had long-established identities, the United States was uniquely formed in part through the institution of slavery. The very notion of Whiteness in America was consolidated through the shared denial of Blackness, a division that became foundational in defining what it meant to be American.
Morrison takes us on a tour of stories by United States authors to illustrate her points. As Morrison explores American literature, she demonstrates that racial dynamics are more complex than simple portrayals of Black inferiority. White writers project not only fear, dread, and contempt onto African American characters but also desire and fascination. Historically for many white authors, Blackness in American literature is entangled with the unknown, the irrational, and the primitive, while Whiteness is associated with knowledge, reason, and civilization. These literary constructions, Morrison argues, are integral to shaping national identity, revealing hidden structures of race, power, and privilege at the heart of American culture.
In a series of three essays, Playing in the Dark dismantles the illusion of American literature as raceless or universal, revealing how these white American authors � figures like Melville, Poe, and Hemingway � relied on Blackness as a crucial construct: a mixed projection of fear, desire, and primitivism that served to define and elevate whiteness. This "Africanist presence," as Morrison terms it, is not peripheral but central, shaping the cultural identity of America itself.
Morrison's critique draws on a rich tapestry of intellectual traditions, situating her work alongside thinkers like Palestinian post-colonialist theorist Edward Said and French philosopher Michel Foucault. Much like Said’s , which shows how Western literature constructs the Orient as a foil to define itself, Morrison demonstrates how American authors conjured Blackness to consolidate a national identity rooted in whiteness. Echoing Foucault in , she shows how racial categories, far from being inherent, are socially constructed through discourse� embedded in literature as both a reflection and reinforcement of power. The parallels to other key thinkers deepen her argument that American literature does not merely reflect a racialized society but actively produces and sustains its hierarchies.
Morrison’s assertions here draw parallels to Frantz Fanon’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness� from , unpacking how in literature, white writers project their internal conflicts and societal anxieties onto Black characters. In these types of stories, Blackness becomes a symbol for the aforementioned irrational, the unknown, and the primitive � qualities that, in turn, allow whiteness to define itself as the embodiment of reason, knowledge, and civilization. Through this lens, Morrison (much like Said with his contrapuntal reading), argues that the construction of Blackness not only reflects the anxieties of whiteness but actually reveals the very mechanisms that sustain it.
Despite its brevity, Playing in the Dark has stood the test of time as a cornerstone of literary and cultural studies, and with that has of course come both admiration and debate. Critics have questioned its omission of figures like Said by name, or the relative scarcity of detailed textual evidence, yet its influence remains undeniable, standing alongside works like Said’s and Judith Butler’s as a paradigm-shifting critique.
What makes Morrison’s argument so enduring is its insistence on relationality. Whiteness, she argues, is not an unmarked universal but a category defined through its opposition to nonwhite “others� and “otherness.� This claim unsettles long-held critical norms, which often treated race as incidental or irrelevant to the major figures of the American literary canon. Morrison’s work demands that we confront the cultural mechanisms by which literature shapes and sustains national identity.
In the end, Playing in the Dark is not just a critique but an invitation to reckon with the unseen forces that shape American literature and, by extension, American identity. Morrison had an unwavering belief in the power of literature to illuminate and transform our cultural understanding, and her foray into academic, cultural critique is based on this fundamental belief that our awareness has the power to reshape how we read, write, and imagine the stories that define us.
January 10, 2015
This was great. Clearly articulated, important work interested in a discourse Morrison observes is left out of contemporary American literary theory. I don't have much experience with American lit, but her clear analyses were such that I had no trouble applying her theories to some of the American texts (and even Canadian ones) that I have read that she didn't directly engage with. She takes major themes in American lit to task�"individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous more problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell"—as reactions to a force that reverberates throughout the national literature: "Africanism." Morrison defines this as a term "for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreads that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people" that has become "both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability." This was an eye-opening work for me as I attempt to educate myself on issues of race in life and in literature. Definitely one to reread.
August 22, 2024
(I’ve lost count but this is maybe 16?) This was the last official book I’m reading for my exam list (in the sense that the questions are released tomorrow, more reading will be selective) and it was a reread, but it felt like reading for the first time. This book obviously gets cited a lot, often as a way of recognizing its influence, but rarely engaged as a text in and of itself. What does Morrison return to again and again, what is she really asking from us (it’s not merely recognition of this Africanist presence/persona). Her writing and thinking and voice is just the right (write) inspiration before I start writing tomorrow…I’m rambling now
January 17, 2024
More to appreciate and understand and see with every single read.
November 25, 2021
This is a monograph on what its subtitle says, "Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," in which Toni Morrison argues that white American writers have depended on the presence of people of African descent to make their imaginative projects go on both the literal and the figurative level---this despite the pretense by white American critics and scholars that American literature is "race-free." This is a ludicrous, universalizing claim (white American experience=all human experience) that only in Toni Morrison's own lifetime began to be disrupted. Morrison looks at texts like Huckleberry Finn and To Have and Have Not and also texts like Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Willa Cather) that I had never even heard of. She teases out what she calls the Africanist presence in the texts she examines, noting the ways in which blackness is used both to define and enable the protagonists and the figurative, symbolic, or allegorical system in which they exist.
Morrison is a very sharp literary critic and explains better than anyone the terrible collapse of the end of Huckleberry Finn:
[...] the fatal ending becomes the elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanist character's escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave. [...] It is not what Jim seems that warrants inquiry, but what Mark Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him that should solicit our attention. In that sense the book may indeed be "great" because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.
(56-57)
I find her argument persuasive and beautifully written. And as she says, "My project rises from delight, not disappointment. It rises from what I know about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language, and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debates blanketed in their text. And rises from my certainty that writers always know, at some level, that they do this" (4). Toni Morrison, in other words, is giving her readers the key to the secret history of American literature by giving them a way to talk about the presence of Black people in a literary tradition that has denied them voice, agency, and humanity. I think, in her belief that "writers always know, at some level, that they do this," she may be kinder to Hemingway and some other authors than is necessarily warranted, but that belief also infuses her text with a great hopefulness.
(She also, in the preface, articulates something that I have been trying to teach my MFA students: "Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer's imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer's notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability" (xi).)
Morrison is a very sharp literary critic and explains better than anyone the terrible collapse of the end of Huckleberry Finn:
[...] the fatal ending becomes the elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanist character's escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave. [...] It is not what Jim seems that warrants inquiry, but what Mark Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him that should solicit our attention. In that sense the book may indeed be "great" because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.
(56-57)
I find her argument persuasive and beautifully written. And as she says, "My project rises from delight, not disappointment. It rises from what I know about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language, and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debates blanketed in their text. And rises from my certainty that writers always know, at some level, that they do this" (4). Toni Morrison, in other words, is giving her readers the key to the secret history of American literature by giving them a way to talk about the presence of Black people in a literary tradition that has denied them voice, agency, and humanity. I think, in her belief that "writers always know, at some level, that they do this," she may be kinder to Hemingway and some other authors than is necessarily warranted, but that belief also infuses her text with a great hopefulness.
(She also, in the preface, articulates something that I have been trying to teach my MFA students: "Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer's imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer's notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability" (xi).)
December 7, 2022
Though she has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Toni Morrison is probably more well known for her literary fiction than her literary theory. This short text--the publication of three William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University--is one of the more important pieces in awakening a sense of the formation of the Black character behind, in, and beyond American literature. Essentially, she argues that White American identity is formed as a negative space, framed by authors' and culture's characterization of Black characters, both overtly and in more occult ways. This text was clear and powerful, though Morrison is not interested in simply creating a new hierarchy of power in her revolution of reading. Her interest isn't so much racism, but racialization.
I am at a bit of a disadvantage in that I am not a strong reader of American literature. I know Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Flannery O'Connor in her examples, and enough of Hemingway to keep up, but the rest is largely unknown to me. I come to this text as part of my struggle to understand Ebony Elizabeth Thomas' "The Dark Fantastic"--which has been part of my journey of discovery of Black women SF writers and trying to appreciate the current moment of racial awakening and challenge. I am also curious about how to read these materials as a non-American, a Canadian, so close and yet so far from the American literary experience. I suspect in Canada, our questions of identity formation are more intricately knit to the First Nations experience and the colonial battle of French and English that continues still.
I appreciate this book and would love to listen to the lectures themselves, though I am still learning.
I am at a bit of a disadvantage in that I am not a strong reader of American literature. I know Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Flannery O'Connor in her examples, and enough of Hemingway to keep up, but the rest is largely unknown to me. I come to this text as part of my struggle to understand Ebony Elizabeth Thomas' "The Dark Fantastic"--which has been part of my journey of discovery of Black women SF writers and trying to appreciate the current moment of racial awakening and challenge. I am also curious about how to read these materials as a non-American, a Canadian, so close and yet so far from the American literary experience. I suspect in Canada, our questions of identity formation are more intricately knit to the First Nations experience and the colonial battle of French and English that continues still.
I appreciate this book and would love to listen to the lectures themselves, though I am still learning.
May 18, 2025
this was excellent.
i mean one could gather this synopsis from the back cover, but it's a phenomenal analysis (literary analysis? like a long-form essay?) of "Africanism" in stories/novels we consider quintessentially "American" -- whether that is to say by a great American author, or in a period of "American writing", or culturally significant of the "American" dream (yes purposeful quotation of American and not dream, because how do we always seem to come back to the romanticisation of the swashbuckling, "rugged individualist" frontier adventurer-American stereotype?).
it's interesting how the ABSENCE of mention of race in these literatures, as per morrison, is as significant if not more so than its presence. we colour around the lines, so to speak, and the glaring silhouette we leave is all the more evidence of what we are trying SO hard to think-not-think about.
i won't try to re-explain what i've learnt because i will not do it justice.
my only complaint: the author assumes (justifiably) that her reader (who has picked up a book on an analysis of race in American literature) has read American literature (notably: Huckleberry Finn). this was, maybe for me, not necessarily the case. this constitutes only a failing on my part, mind you.
this was an excellent book that i'd recommend to any writer or reader.
well written of course. eloquent, complex. takes concentration. (it's probably good for you though.)
i think anyone who reads or writes should consider the analyses in this book -- being critically thoughtful and aware of perspectives we may not even think to consider is what creates more intelligent, introspective readers, writers, artists, and societies.
i mean one could gather this synopsis from the back cover, but it's a phenomenal analysis (literary analysis? like a long-form essay?) of "Africanism" in stories/novels we consider quintessentially "American" -- whether that is to say by a great American author, or in a period of "American writing", or culturally significant of the "American" dream (yes purposeful quotation of American and not dream, because how do we always seem to come back to the romanticisation of the swashbuckling, "rugged individualist" frontier adventurer-American stereotype?).
it's interesting how the ABSENCE of mention of race in these literatures, as per morrison, is as significant if not more so than its presence. we colour around the lines, so to speak, and the glaring silhouette we leave is all the more evidence of what we are trying SO hard to think-not-think about.
i won't try to re-explain what i've learnt because i will not do it justice.
my only complaint: the author assumes (justifiably) that her reader (who has picked up a book on an analysis of race in American literature) has read American literature (notably: Huckleberry Finn). this was, maybe for me, not necessarily the case. this constitutes only a failing on my part, mind you.
this was an excellent book that i'd recommend to any writer or reader.
well written of course. eloquent, complex. takes concentration. (it's probably good for you though.)
i think anyone who reads or writes should consider the analyses in this book -- being critically thoughtful and aware of perspectives we may not even think to consider is what creates more intelligent, introspective readers, writers, artists, and societies.
March 26, 2019
Interesting to check out some of Toni's literary criticism, this book being a composite of several lectures she gave at Harvard in 1990. Unsurprisingly, she is eloquent, clever and considerate with an investigative eye at some of this country's most noted writers (Cather, Twain, Poe, Hemingway) and how the presence of American Africanism in fiction ends up having such a strong influence and impact on the reader and the evolution of American literature.
I particularly got a kick out of her eviscerate Hemingway's work. This is a short (a mere 91 pages in my copy) argument that I would have loved to see expanded further, or featuring a critique on more recent American works, but this is a worthwhile read for those seeking to go deeper and think critically. 3.5/5
I particularly got a kick out of her eviscerate Hemingway's work. This is a short (a mere 91 pages in my copy) argument that I would have loved to see expanded further, or featuring a critique on more recent American works, but this is a worthwhile read for those seeking to go deeper and think critically. 3.5/5
November 10, 2018
This short, thrilling, and brilliant compilation of three lectures Morrison gave at Princeton in the 90s could not be more relevant. It cuts open to the bone the interplay of metaphor, allegory, racist thinking, and the minting of American character in literature and propaganda since the founding of the republic.
You may think that you understand these issues well or well enough, but if you haven't read this book yet or reread it lately, you don't.
You may think that you understand these issues well or well enough, but if you haven't read this book yet or reread it lately, you don't.
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