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everynothing 's review for:
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
by Toni Morrison
informative
A powerful account of how white American literature and its authors use the "black presence" to shape their novels and elevate their protagonists, while silencing and othering black characters and even blackness as a concept and color. Morrison urges her readers, fellow writers, and scholars to shift perspective from the racial object to the racial subject, all the while carefully separating authors from their characters and pointing out that writing can indeed be and is a place of imagination and empathy. The examples are spot on (and quite disturbing), but I feel the chapters are organized from the abstract to the concrete, and I could have followed them better the other way around.