Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.35 AVERAGE
4.35 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
reflective
slow-paced
It goes unsaid at this point that the quality of Toni Morrison's writing is simply ineffable.
In "Playing in the Dark" more specifically I found the wider-reaching and overarching literary analyses to be the most interesting as I feel that I could access and benefit from them the most. However, when Morrison moved to more in-depth textual analyses on canonical American literature which I, in the main, have not read nor ever come across, the textual-specificity of the writing became less pertinent to my reading experience and to an extent lost me. I am sure however that if I were to revisit this text after reading the sidelined works by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, my reception of this text would change largely.
Therefore, though the quality of the writing is never less than wonderful, my experience reading "Playing in the Dark" was largely skewed by my inaccessibility to its field of reference; and though this is completely my own doing, it nevertheless did impact my reading of this otherwise fantastic non-fiction text.
Four stars.
In "Playing in the Dark" more specifically I found the wider-reaching and overarching literary analyses to be the most interesting as I feel that I could access and benefit from them the most. However, when Morrison moved to more in-depth textual analyses on canonical American literature which I, in the main, have not read nor ever come across, the textual-specificity of the writing became less pertinent to my reading experience and to an extent lost me. I am sure however that if I were to revisit this text after reading the sidelined works by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, my reception of this text would change largely.
Therefore, though the quality of the writing is never less than wonderful, my experience reading "Playing in the Dark" was largely skewed by my inaccessibility to its field of reference; and though this is completely my own doing, it nevertheless did impact my reading of this otherwise fantastic non-fiction text.
Four stars.
Morrison is brilliant and this compelling, but brief book asks the readers and critical scholarship of literature to take a harder look at how race impacts white authors and characters, even in texts that some would claim are void of racialized context, which Morrison rightly claims, simply do not exist in American literature.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
more people should read toni morrison i think writing would be better just overall
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
Book 16/52
Favourite Quote: [He] is white, and we know he is because nobody says so.
A short but brilliant analysis of American literature and its unbreakable entanglement with race. This was read in preparation for an essay examining Gothic tradition in literature about slavery, but in general was such an interesting and well-written argument. Did not think I'd be enjoying academic reading as much as I am this year, but here we are :D
Book 16/52
Favourite Quote: [He] is white, and we know he is because nobody says so.
A short but brilliant analysis of American literature and its unbreakable entanglement with race. This was read in preparation for an essay examining Gothic tradition in literature about slavery, but in general was such an interesting and well-written argument. Did not think I'd be enjoying academic reading as much as I am this year, but here we are :D
This is very very good. The demands to read and see and listen differently. America and its literature, the darkness of the Black subjects as shadows,surrogates. The centering of what serves...
I want to start my review with the last few words of Playing in the Dark:
I loved reading this book, partially because I think Morrison cuts to the heart of how effective criticism inquires into the nature of literary texts. Key in Morrison's readings of American literature is an understanding and a sensitivity to the ways in which race not only informs the texts, but how the texts inform the construction of race as a category and identity. The final words of the text which I quote above remind the reader that the critical inquiry is not simply about categorizing the texts but about reading empathetically and carefully for the figures that have been silenced by literary discourse. In revivifying our criticism to include discussions of race, discussions that American literature has always been having, we must not simply paint these texts into a corner. The complexities of race and race formation inform the complexity of text itself, in ways that go beyond the conventional modes of literary critical analysis.
Marking literary texts as racist or nonracist marks them as monolithic, about one aspect of race rather than interesting and critical works in their own right. Certainly American literature is filled with racism, but to leave the discussion at that only objectifies those underdiscussed peoples even further. Calling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a racist book does little to explain or highlight the experiences of Jim as he navigates the antebellum South.
Morrison's examinations are elegant; her purpose, clear. I think this is an essential and quite approachable book for anyone interested in American literature, or literature more generally. Morrison's fiction has been essential reading for many students on college campuses, and I think this critical work should be too.
I wish to close by saying that these deliberations are not about a particular author's attitudes toward race. That is another matter. 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. In no way do I mean investigation of what might be called racist or nonracist literature, and I take no position, nor do I encourage one, on the quality of a work based on the attitudes of an author or whatever representations are made of some group. Such judgments can and are being formed, of course. Recent critical scholarship on Ezra Pound, Céline, T.S. Eliot, and Paul de Man comes to mind. But such concerns are not the intent of this exercise (although fall within its reach). 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.
Ernest Hemingway, who wrote so compellingly about what it was to be a white male American, could not help folding into his enterprise of American fiction its Africanist properties. But it would be a pity if the criticism of that literature continued to shellac those texts, immobilizing their complexities and power and luminations just below its tight, reflecting surface. All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.
I loved reading this book, partially because I think Morrison cuts to the heart of how effective criticism inquires into the nature of literary texts. Key in Morrison's readings of American literature is an understanding and a sensitivity to the ways in which race not only informs the texts, but how the texts inform the construction of race as a category and identity. The final words of the text which I quote above remind the reader that the critical inquiry is not simply about categorizing the texts but about reading empathetically and carefully for the figures that have been silenced by literary discourse. In revivifying our criticism to include discussions of race, discussions that American literature has always been having, we must not simply paint these texts into a corner. The complexities of race and race formation inform the complexity of text itself, in ways that go beyond the conventional modes of literary critical analysis.
Marking literary texts as racist or nonracist marks them as monolithic, about one aspect of race rather than interesting and critical works in their own right. Certainly American literature is filled with racism, but to leave the discussion at that only objectifies those underdiscussed peoples even further. Calling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a racist book does little to explain or highlight the experiences of Jim as he navigates the antebellum South.
Morrison's examinations are elegant; her purpose, clear. I think this is an essential and quite approachable book for anyone interested in American literature, or literature more generally. Morrison's fiction has been essential reading for many students on college campuses, and I think this critical work should be too.
challenging
informative
fast-paced