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ruthlessly 's review for:
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
by Toni Morrison
i always love reading morrison, even though i was so shockingly aware of how lax my brain has got, how unfamiliar i am with complex academic expression at the beginning of this. morrison's my favourite for a reason: she's so clear, clever, such a dynamite stick of intelligence and passion and rigorous examination always.
this was an interesting read, which is really short (my copy is only about 90 pages) but packs a lot. it's taken from a series of lectures, wherein she essentially argues that the literary imagination of US fiction (and she is v specific about it being american, although she does note that such a thing must exist in other colonial literatures) is constructed very deliberately around whiteness and against what she calls 'africanism.' it's an interesting argument that in considering the literature that founded american fiction, as we know it, its important to be aware that even if there appears to be no real consideration given to black americans they are always there. she argues that its important to turn away from "the racial object to the racial subject" and how that's been constructed throughout history.
something i thought was great about this, obviously, is that she very explicitly points to examples of how earlier writers we think of as Great American Writers -- hemingway, poe, willa cather, william faulkner -- all dealt with this american africanism and the uneasy relationship that existed for them as they, by necessity, explored whiteness. she touches on the idea that this american africanism is allowed to be many things, but necessarily constrained by a society that doesn't and will not allow its expansion. the argument about how whiteness requires blackness to set itself up, to oppose it always, that from the 'beginning' of the modern country as we know that whiteness found it necessary to have the enslaved black presence to have something to contrast the need for freedom against is not new but morrison returns to it here and explores it through several key pieces of literature. some of these are derided, pretty universally -- she talks about willa cather's last novel, wherein a disabled white slave owner with no real authority or power over anything in her life, nothing to stand for her except the fact she is white, ultimately ends up constructing her whole self around the sexualised image she holds in her head of a young girl who is eventually helped to escape by her abolitionist daughter.
what i think is so great about this is that morrison, from the outset, is open about how she wishes to examine the way writers have encountered both blackness and whiteness. she says that she started to read things as a writer and it led her to a new consideration: that even when things seem ignored within a text, or barely considered, they cannot be. that a writer's imagination is more than that and must be given its greatest consideration. she believes it is demanding of examination, of due attention, that we must seriously consider that the literary imagination of so many canonical works is white for a reason and what that actually means. she clearly doesn't want anybody to let themselves off the hook when reading, or to let Great Old Novels off the hook either. she's also clearly saying that any notions of politesse must be abandoned to look more clearly at novels and take into full account the racial subject contained within. she's very explicit in the need for this!
i feel like some of what i've said, or what you can read, may not seem as revolutionary as it probably did then -- but then again, the foreward of this book is from 1992. and with all that said, i do still think it's so incredibly important and active work that must be undertaken by people -- like me! like a lot of people out there -- all the time when we encounter works that do not seem to focus on anything but whiteness. i thought it was great. wish i was smart enough to understand it all!
this was an interesting read, which is really short (my copy is only about 90 pages) but packs a lot. it's taken from a series of lectures, wherein she essentially argues that the literary imagination of US fiction (and she is v specific about it being american, although she does note that such a thing must exist in other colonial literatures) is constructed very deliberately around whiteness and against what she calls 'africanism.' it's an interesting argument that in considering the literature that founded american fiction, as we know it, its important to be aware that even if there appears to be no real consideration given to black americans they are always there. she argues that its important to turn away from "the racial object to the racial subject" and how that's been constructed throughout history.
something i thought was great about this, obviously, is that she very explicitly points to examples of how earlier writers we think of as Great American Writers -- hemingway, poe, willa cather, william faulkner -- all dealt with this american africanism and the uneasy relationship that existed for them as they, by necessity, explored whiteness. she touches on the idea that this american africanism is allowed to be many things, but necessarily constrained by a society that doesn't and will not allow its expansion. the argument about how whiteness requires blackness to set itself up, to oppose it always, that from the 'beginning' of the modern country as we know that whiteness found it necessary to have the enslaved black presence to have something to contrast the need for freedom against is not new but morrison returns to it here and explores it through several key pieces of literature. some of these are derided, pretty universally -- she talks about willa cather's last novel, wherein a disabled white slave owner with no real authority or power over anything in her life, nothing to stand for her except the fact she is white, ultimately ends up constructing her whole self around the sexualised image she holds in her head of a young girl who is eventually helped to escape by her abolitionist daughter.
what i think is so great about this is that morrison, from the outset, is open about how she wishes to examine the way writers have encountered both blackness and whiteness. she says that she started to read things as a writer and it led her to a new consideration: that even when things seem ignored within a text, or barely considered, they cannot be. that a writer's imagination is more than that and must be given its greatest consideration. she believes it is demanding of examination, of due attention, that we must seriously consider that the literary imagination of so many canonical works is white for a reason and what that actually means. she clearly doesn't want anybody to let themselves off the hook when reading, or to let Great Old Novels off the hook either. she's also clearly saying that any notions of politesse must be abandoned to look more clearly at novels and take into full account the racial subject contained within. she's very explicit in the need for this!
i feel like some of what i've said, or what you can read, may not seem as revolutionary as it probably did then -- but then again, the foreward of this book is from 1992. and with all that said, i do still think it's so incredibly important and active work that must be undertaken by people -- like me! like a lot of people out there -- all the time when we encounter works that do not seem to focus on anything but whiteness. i thought it was great. wish i was smart enough to understand it all!