lunarriviera 's review for:

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

4.0

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A strange book, by my reading of it. Semi-scholarly, revised lectures that hint at the presence of what Morrison calls the "Africanist" in American literature, particularly 19th- and early 20th-century. It's odd—I completely buy her thesis, which seems self-evident, even—but she offers not much evidence for it, and her prose is oddly laborious. There are two Morrisons, and fortunately this is the work of the first—the book editor for whom Song of Solomon and Sula were her entries in American fiction on a par with Zora Neale Hurston, Stein and Faulkner. Later Morrison (post-Beloved) does not bear much inquiry. I suspect this is most valuable for its popularization of ideas better articulated elsewhere. Mostly I'd now like to read the Cather and Poe novels to which she glancingly refers.