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shaunnow38 's review for:
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
by Toni Morrison
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.