shgmclicious 's review for:

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

3.0

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I really wanted to love this book, and I was excited to read it, but ultimately I found it to be not so great. I think Morrison's thesis is a good one, and ideally a discussion of what she calls "Africanism" (a term I dislike, even though I see it's her version of Orientalism, because Orientalism works because the original term isn't really used anymore) would be great followup for students who have read excerpts of Said's work, because it does bring it closer to home, at least for Americans. That said, I didn't really feel like this was a book like Orientalism at all; instead of explaining her idea fully, she went straight into close reading, and you can't prove anything by close reading if you haven't explained what it is you're proving. The final third of the book came closest to that, and its study of Hemingway was near to what I think she was getting at, but all together I think this book missed its mark by trying to take on too much content with too much brevity.