Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [Hardcover]

Toni Morrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0674673778 | ISBN-13: 978-0674673779 | Edition: First Edition

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest."

Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Morrison takes a turn as a literary critic, examining the American literary imagination and finding it obsessed with the white/black polarity.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Morrison ( Jazz , LJ 4/15/92) believes that an African American presence, largely ignored by critics, has always permeated white American literature. She opens by carefully setting her parameters and defining her terms--e.g., Africanism: "the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people." The first few pages feature densely packed language whose meaning becomes clearer when Morrison examines such specific works as Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl . This brief, highly provocative book, which considers "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it," is highly recommended not only for Morrison's many admirers but for all those interested in American literature.
-Louis J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn Campus , New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 110 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (May 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674673778
• ISBN-13: 978-0674673779
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #432,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening, October 10, 2000

By 

Maurice Williams "mauricewms" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Hardcover)

Playing in the Dark is without a doubt, the most informative critique of the use of the African American presence in American literature. Morrison critiques the work of some of the most famous American novelist and points out how their work is influenced by blackness. Her critique is sharp and forthright. She challenges writers and critics alike to reevaluate their use of language, coding, and imagery as it relates to characters or situations of an "Africanist" nature. The critique identifies specific instances where negative imagery and characterizations are used by writers to help solidify whatever point being made, or image being created. Playing in the Dark should be required reading for any literature curriculum and any critic or writer who dare place pen to paper in an effort to inform or enlighten the reading public.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Importance of Seeing in the Dark, February 20, 2001

By 

Ragan Fox (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Paperback)

When I first read this amazing criticism on American literary history, I finally got it. A huge cloud of misunderstanding and empty justifications lifted from above my head, and I, for the first time, learned how to critically analyze a text. Much more, I learned how to engage with a history of texts. Playing in the Dark effectively chronicles the absence or misconstruction of African-Americans in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemmingway. Morrison's illuminations on how the presence of black is often conflated with evil and lurking metaphores, while white is typically reduced to all that is pure is truly brought to life through the literary examples she utilizes. Further, her argument concerning how Africanism was/is used as a distancing mechanism to ensure hegemony retains its power is most likely the most well developed argument of its kind.

All of Morrison's thoughts are hopefully (and I stress hopefully with utopian blinders on) already flying through the psyches of Americans, but Playing in the Dark gives concrete words to abstract thoughts. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who plans to critically engage in literature.

14 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, and yet a writer may not be the best critic, March 20, 2005

By 

Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say" (OLLIERGUES France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Hardcover)

Toni Morrison is excellent in these three lectures. She analyzes some white American novels brilliantly and shows how the whole structure and meaning can be re-read from the presence of what she calls Africanism at the back of the mind of the author and at times in the novel itself. Her approach is far-reaching and does not only take into consideration the presence of a black person, but also the deeply metaphorical presence of a dark side in the author's imagination and novels, a dark side that informs the whole work and structures the plot and the story. She tries to explain this presence of this dark side by showing how the Europeans who fled Europe to come to America for a new start arrived with no real model to imitate, and that they had to structure their own personalities from scratch. This could only be done by finding an alter ego that will embody the « other » any person needs to build their personalities. This « other », she says, is naturally the African slave that brings together several differences that make him perfectly easy to become the object of this ego-building : social alienation (slaves), cultural and linguistic alienation (they have been torn away from their cultures and languages) and racial alienation (blacks). The last alienation makes the other two absolutely irreversible because it cannot in any way be changed or hidden. This explains the structuring power of race or rather blackness in this society whose hierarchical structure is never denied or even questioned. Yet I remain slightly unsatisfied in the absolutely uniqueness of this experience. The Europeans when they arrived found the Indians and they tried to make them subservient and even slaves. They could not do it because these Indians did not survive very long in such a position and the most enterprising ones, Cherokees, Iroquois, Seminoles, etc, learned very fast and easily conquered their autonomy and developed a viable economic system. So the Europeans turned to Africans who were rather easily turned into slaves, with no pangs of conscience for the Europeans because they were not natives, so the land was not theirs, and they were black, hence absolutely different by embodying century old fantasms and fears among Europeans who discarded black as being devilish, satanic, dirty, etc. Here we have to insist on one element that Toni Morrison discards too fast : the Europeans had to exterminate the un-enslavable Indians to get their land and then bring the Blacks to America. The Indian genocide is the primary condition for the enslavement of the Blacks. The second element is that she seems to consider the European Enlightenment justified this enslavement of the Blacks. Here I have to disagree because Monstesquieu, for one, and quite many others like Rousseau, Diderot, it is true mainly French people, rejected this approach that pretended Blacks were not human and even had no souls. This French Enlightenment actually produced the abolition of slavery by the French Revolution, even if Napoleon reinstated it later on. That would have enabled Toni Morrison to answer a question she does not ask because she has no answer : where did the abolitionists come from, where did abolitionism come from, if what she describes is the only connection with Europe ? But there is even another question. What she describes is in perfect agreement with the logic and dialectic of the « subject » as advocated by Lacan. Since she quotes Marie Cardinal she should have found out about Lacan. In absolutely any society so far (no developed class-less society has ever existed on the planet) when a subject rejects the « Authority » pole of his personality, authority that is embodied in someone else, in the « social other », that person is dominated by his impulses, positive and negative, and he becomes his only master. Then he has to rebuild this pole of his personality, and the « other » becomes the one he is going to reject. In all our societies there has been an « other ». She hints at social alienation and evokes cultural and linguistic alienation. But our societies have always found a scapegoat that became that « other » they could easily reject, enslave or even massacre : the Jews, the protestants or the catholics, the moslems, Arabs, gypsies, or even women as for that, and for some today in our lay societies priests and believers of any denomination, and our societies can even use one category of the past to build up the rejected group : fascists, nazis, stalinists, maoists, etc. The only point she has is the over-determination that color adds to this phenomenon, though Arabs or Moslems in Europe today, and for centuries in the past, qualify for that kind of racist attitude, and we all know about agism, sexism, homophobic attitudes and many others. She though has an enormous point when she says that invisibility does not solve the problem because the Blacks may be invisible in language, literature, and other politically correct discourses, but they remain visible and at times hauntingly overvisible in the minds of people. One cannot decree the end of racism with a law or a couple of anti-racist classes in school. I think that Ralph Ellison saw more and farther when he said « we have to be one and many at the same time », or when he defended democratic diversity in society and in each social or racial group of this society.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU