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4.35 AVERAGE
4.35 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
tense
fast-paced
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is a really great essay that explores the ways in which Black characters and the concept of black vs. white are used to serve white characters’ journeys and a (presumed) white audience.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
An incomparable, short but profound book on how American literature uses and looks past whiteness and blackness.
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
In this volume Morrison writes 'I intend to outline an attractive, fruitful, and provocative crtical project.' Well, she does outline her project--examining the role of whiteness in literature through white authors' depictions of the Africanist Other. (Africanism = kind of like Said's Orientalism.) The critical project is an interesting one because, as Morrison points out, the white writer unconsciously presumes him or herself to be race-free and universal while all others are raced. Her concise analysis of how metaphors and figurations of the racial Other in literature have shaped (white) American identity, discourse and notions of self are thoughtful and articulate.
Unfortunately, when it comes to expounding her project itself, the meager analysis and some overused examples (Jim & Huck's relationship in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn) make the study a rather weak one. Her study doesn't feel like a novel approach--it seems like the mirror image of the white vs. Other racialized discourses that she's critiquing. It seems, well, rather obvious that when white folks write about black folks they're really representing their own anxieties and issues.
One observation about race in liberal discourse is as fresh today as it was when this text was written in the early 1990s:
'The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.' (p. 10)
14 November 2012 | Updated to add:
I think I need to revisit this book now that I'm reading bell hooks's [b:Black Looks Race and Representation|529568|Black Looks Race and Representation|Bell Hooks|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348175035s/529568.jpg|19160], which was published in the same year as Morrison's text. hooks grounds the interrogation of whiteness so clearly that it made Playing in the Dark jump into my mind. And I realize now that while Morrison's ideas didn't seem so novel and fresh in 2011, that's because what she articulated almost twenty years earlier had become part of the academy and familiar in discourse. But without her work and that of bell hooks, I wouldn't be able to think it 'rather obvious'.
Unfortunately, when it comes to expounding her project itself, the meager analysis and some overused examples (Jim & Huck's relationship in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn) make the study a rather weak one. Her study doesn't feel like a novel approach--it seems like the mirror image of the white vs. Other racialized discourses that she's critiquing. It seems, well, rather obvious that when white folks write about black folks they're really representing their own anxieties and issues.
One observation about race in liberal discourse is as fresh today as it was when this text was written in the early 1990s:
'The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.' (p. 10)
14 November 2012 | Updated to add:
I think I need to revisit this book now that I'm reading bell hooks's [b:Black Looks Race and Representation|529568|Black Looks Race and Representation|Bell Hooks|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348175035s/529568.jpg|19160], which was published in the same year as Morrison's text. hooks grounds the interrogation of whiteness so clearly that it made Playing in the Dark jump into my mind. And I realize now that while Morrison's ideas didn't seem so novel and fresh in 2011, that's because what she articulated almost twenty years earlier had become part of the academy and familiar in discourse. But without her work and that of bell hooks, I wouldn't be able to think it 'rather obvious'.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced