jbindy 's review for:

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

5.0

---

In this work of literary criticism, Morrison unpacks what she calls the "Africanist presence" throughout American literature, tracing how [white, male] American authors use conflicting, contradictory structures of Blackness to reify the whiteness of their characters, themselves, and 'American' cultural identity. "Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say" (59). The literary phenomena that Morrison identifies in this work reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Parallel to Hurston's contextual sense of racialized identity, American whiteness, in the literary imagination, exists only in relation to portrayals of Blackness in American literature. Morrison's project is a call for literary critics to redirect their attention "from the racial object to the racial subject," which will only enhance our critical understanding of literature, and by extension American cultural identity.