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Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

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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.

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.

An excellent monograph discussing the African presence in pieces of liturature, particularly early American literature, that were previously thought to be void of such refrerences. She also offers some very interesting insights on the true motives of slavery and race relations.

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

The vital importance of "Africanism" to the construction of "whiteness" in America has for too long gone ackowledged. Fortunately, Toni Morrison has taken the first step towards the erasure of this disgusting continuation of "sidelining" a black presence that, as Morrison clearly points out in in this illuminating monograph, has served as the building block in the long self-definition process of Americas and its literature. A brilliantly titled, written, and executed ninety pages, "Playing in the dark" demands reading from anyone remotely interested in the formation of America's founding literature and cultural ideologies. If anyone can tackle this subject, it is Toni Morrison, and she does so with a lucidity neccesassy when "playing in the dark."

Daniel A. Jacome Tufts University

In a language that yields great insight after struggle, Morrison does a terrific job of providing scholars a reason to discuss race, color, and nationality as central factors in "American" literature. The fact that nonwhite characters (not to mention nonwhite writers) have been so ignored is because questions of personal and national identity have been considered too particular, too political for discussions based upon (solipsistic) universality. The implication, then, is that black people have no personhood, because their very individuality particularizes them out of academic, though not physical, existence. Morrison shows how crucial the acceptance and reproduction of pathological reactions to racial difference are to the formation of American literature and the attainment of American citizenship. She shows that figures and symbols of racial difference affect internal textual issues of plot, setting, theme, character, and point of view and attendant issues of a character's authority and the appearance of a text's "realism." From her springboard, one may also look for configurations of racial difference in everything from philosophy to crimonology. Her account seeks not to censor but to enlarge the debate about America's "great" texts.

Short book by Tony Morrison based on her university lectures are three part mediatations on matters of race in americal literature. Morrison explores what is takes to be black. She looks at the literature from two points of view: reader - someone who absorbs what someone else has to say and writer - creator of stories that writes about their observations about the world and has influence over the reader in a manner of perception of truth. In addition to addressing race, she talks about gender too. It is subtly brought to our attention that in today's world it is much harder to be black woman than a black man. Black woman is more vulnerable to the cruelties of the world. Shades of her skin can either include her or exclude her from the black society, while the white society is tenfold more cruel as there is no acceptance of the "colored" folks but only hostility. In the literary world that Morrison critiques, black woman is considered an object with no emotion, attachment, dignity, susceptible to sexual trade or exploitation, as there are no consequences to such treatment. In another words, black woman is considered dispensable by the society. Black ordinary man on the other hand, while treated as a second class citizen -- can manage fine in a society for as long as he can draw a distance between himself and the white society. The detachment is assurance to the white society of freedom of "pollution" of any kind: spiritual, sexual and social. Black man who does not realize a need for such detachment can get beat up, whipped or vebrally abused. Unlike women, they end up short of rape. Finally, the political consequences of race is the last part of the book that inevitably blends into meditation on women and their role in the society as nurses, mothers and comforters of sorts. Although the preface to the book is written in 1992, this book gives very interesting insight to the state of the racial tension that is so obvious in the election year where race, gender, class and social standing are fearlessly fighting for power. This book, considered literary criticism is very relevant to our world of today. Morrison wisely teaches us to recognise what black is vs. what others want you to think, thru literary fiction, what black is.

Toni Morrison's short and engaging look at the role that African Americans have played in the development and telling of the "American" story is insightful and honest. This book forces people to think about how much our culture is influenced by the traditionally marginalized folks that make up a large part of our population but who historically have not had a large voice in sharing their experiences of America with the rest of us.

Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors; her blend of style, fierce intelligence, ambition, daring, and tenderness is rare to find in American authors today. More than anything, Morrison wants to write books that /matter/, that challenge our preconceptions and prejudices and force us to acknowledge our complicity in social problems.

/Playing in the Dark/ is a book that matters. In it, Morrison engages in a fascinating critical project: to trace an "Africanist" presence through American literature and see how people of African descent have been used in literature as ways to talk about freedom, bondage, passion, discipline, class, sex, power... (By "Africanist," Morrison is referring to 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." (p.6-7) ) It's an intriguing, important idea, and one well worth looking into. Morrison offers some generalized thoughts about the matter and also talks about looking at how the Africanist presence in American literature can be seen as a way to, by contrast, construct a portrait of what "whiteness" is supposed to be. She then moves on to some inspired readings of Cather's /Sapphira and the Slave Girl/, Poe's /The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym/, Twain's /Huckleberry Finn/ (perhaps the best of the intrepretations offered), and Hemingway's /To Have and Have Not/ and /The Garden of Eden/.

Unfortunately, this book is simply too short - it's a scant ninety pages. Morrison's ideas entice and seduce us, but it is over all too soon. More case studies ranging over a wider time period in American literature would be helpful. Too, Morrison makes claims that need to be corroborated but aren't in the book. For example, she makes the claim that images of whiteness and paleness usually appear to close a narrative in which there is a strong Africanist presence, saying "They {the images} appear so often and in such particular circumstance that they give pause." (p.33)" All well and good, but she gives us no more than the solitary example of /The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym./

This book is still definitely worth looking into for anyone interested in race and American fiction. It's just too bad that Morrison could not have delineated her ideas more fully.

Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the Literay Imagination is an eye opneing experience. it allows the reader to understand that those who call themselves Literary scholars, do not understand or see the importance of black,African or African American Literature. It is a dismissal, either intentionally or unintentionally, of writing that is, to those who do reviews, foreign.
Playing in the Dark also examines the use of blacks in literay works. it explores how black characters are somewhat a non entity. They are used somewhat as a prop, a filler, though, the story and/or the story line, in many cases could not exist without these characters.
the book explores how the authors do not know how to develop these characters because the authors themselves have a preconceived opinion of blacks, therefore it would be almost impossible for them to understand how to utilize these characters in a way that enriches their story.