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4.35 AVERAGE
4.35 AVERAGE
What I would’ve given to take a class with Toni Morrison. Brilliant.
Truly brilliant essays on the lack of representation within American literature as it developed its own canon. What else would you expect from the best American novelist?
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Always love Toni Morrison and thought this compilation of essays was thought provoking and powerful. A lot of what she is pointing out shows up in her books.
Although she is critiquing classic, literary fiction in America, it also made me think further into the modern fantasy genre. Many include slavery and racism, just as like, a fantasy theme, and many of the most popular are written by white women. And then they are ambiguous about race on purpose…and though they may be works of fiction, they are pulling these concepts from reality, from history, but not their history and….There’s a lot to be said here.
Although she is critiquing classic, literary fiction in America, it also made me think further into the modern fantasy genre. Many include slavery and racism, just as like, a fantasy theme, and many of the most popular are written by white women. And then they are ambiguous about race on purpose…and though they may be works of fiction, they are pulling these concepts from reality, from history, but not their history and….There’s a lot to be said here.
i always love reading morrison, even though i was so shockingly aware of how lax my brain has got, how unfamiliar i am with complex academic expression at the beginning of this. morrison's my favourite for a reason: she's so clear, clever, such a dynamite stick of intelligence and passion and rigorous examination always.
this was an interesting read, which is really short (my copy is only about 90 pages) but packs a lot. it's taken from a series of lectures, wherein she essentially argues that the literary imagination of US fiction (and she is v specific about it being american, although she does note that such a thing must exist in other colonial literatures) is constructed very deliberately around whiteness and against what she calls 'africanism.' it's an interesting argument that in considering the literature that founded american fiction, as we know it, its important to be aware that even if there appears to be no real consideration given to black americans they are always there. she argues that its important to turn away from "the racial object to the racial subject" and how that's been constructed throughout history.
something i thought was great about this, obviously, is that she very explicitly points to examples of how earlier writers we think of as Great American Writers -- hemingway, poe, willa cather, william faulkner -- all dealt with this american africanism and the uneasy relationship that existed for them as they, by necessity, explored whiteness. she touches on the idea that this american africanism is allowed to be many things, but necessarily constrained by a society that doesn't and will not allow its expansion. the argument about how whiteness requires blackness to set itself up, to oppose it always, that from the 'beginning' of the modern country as we know that whiteness found it necessary to have the enslaved black presence to have something to contrast the need for freedom against is not new but morrison returns to it here and explores it through several key pieces of literature. some of these are derided, pretty universally -- she talks about willa cather's last novel, wherein a disabled white slave owner with no real authority or power over anything in her life, nothing to stand for her except the fact she is white, ultimately ends up constructing her whole self around the sexualised image she holds in her head of a young girl who is eventually helped to escape by her abolitionist daughter.
what i think is so great about this is that morrison, from the outset, is open about how she wishes to examine the way writers have encountered both blackness and whiteness. she says that she started to read things as a writer and it led her to a new consideration: that even when things seem ignored within a text, or barely considered, they cannot be. that a writer's imagination is more than that and must be given its greatest consideration. she believes it is demanding of examination, of due attention, that we must seriously consider that the literary imagination of so many canonical works is white for a reason and what that actually means. she clearly doesn't want anybody to let themselves off the hook when reading, or to let Great Old Novels off the hook either. she's also clearly saying that any notions of politesse must be abandoned to look more clearly at novels and take into full account the racial subject contained within. she's very explicit in the need for this!
i feel like some of what i've said, or what you can read, may not seem as revolutionary as it probably did then -- but then again, the foreward of this book is from 1992. and with all that said, i do still think it's so incredibly important and active work that must be undertaken by people -- like me! like a lot of people out there -- all the time when we encounter works that do not seem to focus on anything but whiteness. i thought it was great. wish i was smart enough to understand it all!
this was an interesting read, which is really short (my copy is only about 90 pages) but packs a lot. it's taken from a series of lectures, wherein she essentially argues that the literary imagination of US fiction (and she is v specific about it being american, although she does note that such a thing must exist in other colonial literatures) is constructed very deliberately around whiteness and against what she calls 'africanism.' it's an interesting argument that in considering the literature that founded american fiction, as we know it, its important to be aware that even if there appears to be no real consideration given to black americans they are always there. she argues that its important to turn away from "the racial object to the racial subject" and how that's been constructed throughout history.
something i thought was great about this, obviously, is that she very explicitly points to examples of how earlier writers we think of as Great American Writers -- hemingway, poe, willa cather, william faulkner -- all dealt with this american africanism and the uneasy relationship that existed for them as they, by necessity, explored whiteness. she touches on the idea that this american africanism is allowed to be many things, but necessarily constrained by a society that doesn't and will not allow its expansion. the argument about how whiteness requires blackness to set itself up, to oppose it always, that from the 'beginning' of the modern country as we know that whiteness found it necessary to have the enslaved black presence to have something to contrast the need for freedom against is not new but morrison returns to it here and explores it through several key pieces of literature. some of these are derided, pretty universally -- she talks about willa cather's last novel, wherein a disabled white slave owner with no real authority or power over anything in her life, nothing to stand for her except the fact she is white, ultimately ends up constructing her whole self around the sexualised image she holds in her head of a young girl who is eventually helped to escape by her abolitionist daughter.
what i think is so great about this is that morrison, from the outset, is open about how she wishes to examine the way writers have encountered both blackness and whiteness. she says that she started to read things as a writer and it led her to a new consideration: that even when things seem ignored within a text, or barely considered, they cannot be. that a writer's imagination is more than that and must be given its greatest consideration. she believes it is demanding of examination, of due attention, that we must seriously consider that the literary imagination of so many canonical works is white for a reason and what that actually means. she clearly doesn't want anybody to let themselves off the hook when reading, or to let Great Old Novels off the hook either. she's also clearly saying that any notions of politesse must be abandoned to look more clearly at novels and take into full account the racial subject contained within. she's very explicit in the need for this!
i feel like some of what i've said, or what you can read, may not seem as revolutionary as it probably did then -- but then again, the foreward of this book is from 1992. and with all that said, i do still think it's so incredibly important and active work that must be undertaken by people -- like me! like a lot of people out there -- all the time when we encounter works that do not seem to focus on anything but whiteness. i thought it was great. wish i was smart enough to understand it all!
“American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.” (47)
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5/5 for picture they used of toni morrison for the front cover alone
Highly, highly recommend reading. I love the way that Morrison writes and explains her ideas, deconstructs tropes, and refolds narratives and puts them into a culturally radical perspective -- one that completely demolishes race and the racial hierarchy while examining how whiteness is the absence of culture and critiquing its passive and active violence on culture, people of color, and white people.
Many quotes resonated with me:
Many quotes resonated with me:
"...struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'othering' of people and language, which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowledgable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing Blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains" (x-xi).
"... escape from Old World was 'escape from license' - from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined - for those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones, constraint and limitation impelled the journey. All the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty, prison, social ostracism, and death. [...] Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the 'clean slate' variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again but to be born again in new clothes. [...] The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God's Law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt" (33-35).
"Nothing highlighted freedom - if it did not in fact create it - like slavery" (38)."Knowledge, however mundane and utilitarian, plays about in linguistic images and forms cultural practice" (49)."The ideological dependence on racialism is intact and, like its metaphysical existence, offers in historical, political, and literary discourse a safe route into meditations on morality and ethics; a way of examining the mind-body dichotomy; a way of thinking about justice; a way of contemplating the modern world" (64).
Morrison just explains it all so well and explores in-depth the taking that whiteness claims and how whiteness claims the voidness of Blackness and Africanism. Whiteness wants to swallow whole culture and people. I'm not sure if this is what Morrison is saying, but that's what I'm taking away from this book.
So many good, savory moments of realization and things connecting for me with regards to how we're not necessarily facing a racial problem, but a cultural (or metaphysical as Morrison describes it) problem and how racialism has taken form to shape culture / metaphysics to disrupt care, love, compassion, and just being.
informative
reflective
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
It's Toni Morrison--obviously it's fantastic.
Playing in the Dark contains three essays in which Morrison interrogates the relationship between Whiteness and Blackness in the formation of early American literature. She argues that this literature, so often created without mention of race or Blackness, is still haunted by it, echoing it.
It's a great collection, and I would highly recommend if it sounds like your thing.
Side note: I would love to see if any Indigenous scholars have used the same framework, used Morrison, to make a case for the same thing re: Indigeneity in early American lit, as well.
Playing in the Dark contains three essays in which Morrison interrogates the relationship between Whiteness and Blackness in the formation of early American literature. She argues that this literature, so often created without mention of race or Blackness, is still haunted by it, echoing it.
It's a great collection, and I would highly recommend if it sounds like your thing.
Side note: I would love to see if any Indigenous scholars have used the same framework, used Morrison, to make a case for the same thing re: Indigeneity in early American lit, as well.