litbitch 's review for:

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

4.0

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There's a lot of great observations in here, especially if you're a connoisseur or student of American literature. For me, the most illuminating, and shockingly shocking observation was the simple recognition that we don't talk about the meaning of race in American Literature classes. I have an MA in literature, focusing on American Lit, and I don't remember a real discussion of race ever. Not with Faulkner, not with Twain, not with Morrison herself (maybe the compulsion to avoid talk of race is why we never read The Bluest Eye in school, but did read Beloved, where talk of race could be substituted with talk of slavery?). And I went to pretty good schools and had pretty good Professors. It did seem, as she said, impolite to broach the topic. I remember feeling the need to get some guidance, clarity on the different kinds and degrees of racism in these American classics at the very least, but no dice.
But that nod to academic failings is just the jumping off point for Toni Morrison's brief, dense analysis if the role of blackness in American lit.

Very academic. Not in terms of bibliographic references, but definitely in the lexicon and some assumptions about our understanding of how literature works.