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 | | Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison ISBN-10: 9780679745426 ISBN-10: 0-679-74542-4 ISBN-13: 9780679745426 ISBN-13: 978-0-679-74542-6 Paperback 1993-07-27 Vintage Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description 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. "By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." --Chicago Tribune "Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer." The New York Times Book Review | ||
Reviews | ||
Morrison is Brilliant Playing in the Dark raises important questions about white hegemony in our literary traditions. It is extremely well written and will make you look at everything you read in a different light. Great book. | ||
Black characters in American Literature 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. | ||
Is Toni Morrison for Real? The reviewer below who said "More Heat Than Light" got it partly right. This book is SO badly written you have to wonder if the author's other works were written by the same person. Not only is it sophomoric, it is gibberish. Had its author been unknown, she would surely have had to pay for the book's publication. Incredibly bad, it may at least serve as a source of hope for struggling writers who believe that only the best works are accepted by publishers. | ||
Good, and yet a writer may not be the best critic 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 | ||
Selling Out Huck -- And Kissing Up To Scarlett It's not surprising that a black feminist author would want to trash the "dead white guys" who made American literature. What is interesting is the phony way Toni Morrison wants to hang racism solely on white men, never on white women. She spends page after page trying to dig up dirt on masculine writers like Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, while entirely ignoring the far more poisonous racism of white women like Margaret Mitchell and Edith Wharton. Toni Morrison feels threatened by Huck Finn -- enough to trash him good -- and not at all threatened by Scarlett O'Hara. This is interesting. After all, Huck Finn risks his life to set a black man free, while Scarlett is an unrepentant slaveowner who feeds off black suffering like a parasite. So why is it that Scarlett gets a pass while Huck gets jumped on like a white jogger in Central Park? Perhaps the problem is that Mark Twain isn't really attacking racism so much as he's attacking respectability. Twain suggests that it's the hunger for wealth, status, comfort, and respectability that causes people to mistreat others -- and that well-bred Widow Douglas is no better than white trash Pap Finn. What Morrison resents is not that Twain is too tough on Nigger Jim, but that he's too tough on the Widow Douglas. It seems clear that Morrison doesn't want to be free in the sense that runaway Jim is free -- that is, to be able to come and go as she pleases and think her own thoughts. Secretly, she wants to be "free" in the way that Widow Douglas and Scarlett O'hara are free. She wants the life of luxury and privilege that the white ladies she secretly admires have always had. She'd rather pal around with rich white "ladies" like Mary Gordon (who is under the Barnard veneer the worst sort of shanty Irish bigot) than with trash like the black men now serving in Iraq. And she's perfectly willing to sell the trash down the river to do it, be they white or black. | ||