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thejadedhippy's review against another edition
3.0
A foundational text in Whiteness Studies, parts of this book appeal primarily to the literary critic while other parts are clearly useful for anyone who investigates stories or representations of any kind. Most directly she is trying to excavate the invisibilized African/African American presence in some of the "great literature" of the United States. These texts seem to be about white people but are also, unavoidably, about black people as well. A great primer for understanding the way in which metaphor and other symbolic representation of Whiteness is about so much more than just white people.
ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
“The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery. Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.”
TITLE—Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
AUTHOR—Toni Morrison
PUBLISHED—1993 (which means that this work has been present in american lit crit & theoretical discourse for 30+ years now—keep that in mind)
PUBLISHER—Vintage Books (Random House)
GENRE—literary analysis from a sociopolitical angle
SETTING—the United States
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—white American literature & the influence of the country’s (largely unexamined in this context) racialized cultural history, the inevitable pair of a constructed binary—i.e. where there is white there must be black, where there is light there must be dark—even when the other part is unmentioned or unacknowledged (i.e. Black characters are named as black, while white characters are white because their race is unnamed), the construct of “classic” literature, reading is political, academic style writing
“When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum—or a dismissal mandated by the label "political." Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly.”
Summary:
“A compelling dissection of U.S. fiction... To recognize the black presence in white fiction as offering both threat and reassurance permits Morrison to challenge some of the most widely accepted generalizations about our literary history.... Morrison’s individual readings are not just convincing, they are alarming.” — San Francisco Chronicle
My thoughts:
Ok but how did I *ever* take an American literature course where this wasn’t assigned reading?
This book was published in 1993. I had my first literature class as a freshman in highschool in 2002. There is only one excuse for my only having read this book now, in 2024(!😩🫠) and that reason is—appropriately, actually—the subject of this book.
In her book, Decolonizing Therapy, Jennifer Mullan writes “Even when no one in the room is white—whiteness IS in the room.” Of course the inverse of that is also necessarily true as well, and, as Morrison convincingly argues in this book, is actually the crux of every work of white American literature where the author has undertaken positively acrobatic contortions to ignore or disregard the everpresent “darkness” as anything other than subservient, rightly conquerable, & inherently weak, & yet still attempt to create a philosophically (never mind morally) coherent work of literature, which, of course, they necessarily always fail to do.
In service to this goal, Morrison conducts multiple case studies, considering a handful of yt-authored works of classic american literature (from Willa Cather to Poe, from Mark Twain to Hemingway) through the lens of the effect of unexamined racialized notions & sociocultural constructions on the author’s imagination.
I would recommend this book to *all* readers of American literature. This book is best read with your annotations kit handy.
Final note: Also I am almost certain that the editions of To Have and to Have Not that we read in highschool did not have that many instances of the n-word in them which is pretty gross that a) not only were we assigned that book & then not even properly taught about the use of racial differentiation in the text, but that b) they were actually censored books. 🥴 So messed up.
“The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CW // lots of passages are quoted that have the n-word in part iii when she is discussing Hemingway’s writing (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Season: whenever you are feeling your most studious
Further Reading—
- THE DARK FANTASTIC by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
- THE SOURCE OF SELF REGARD by Toni Morrison
- SISTER OUTSIDER by Audre Lorde
- STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING by Ibram X. Kendi
- Authors discussed in the book: Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow
- THE WORDS TO SAY IT by Marie Cardinal—TBR
Favorite Quotes—
“I was interested, as I had been for a long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.”
“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial "unconsciousness" or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be "universal" or race-free?”
“…the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject. What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions. The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.”
“Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
“These images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing. This haunting, a darkness from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory situation in which American writers found themselves during the formative years of the nation's literatures.”
“American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.”
“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”
“Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.”
“A writer's response to American Africanism often provides a subtext that either sabotages the surface text's expressed intentions or escapes them through a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to register.”
“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 was interested, as I had been for a long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.”
“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial "unconsciousness" or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be "universal" or race-free?”
“…the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject. What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions. The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.”
“Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
“These images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing. This haunting, a darkness from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory situation in which American writers found themselves during the formative years of the nation's literatures.”
“American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.”
“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”
“Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.”
“A writer's response to American Africanism often provides a subtext that either sabotages the surface text's expressed intentions or escapes them through a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to register.”
“All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs
exlibris42's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
jayisreading's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
In less than one hundred pages, Toni Morrison presented a sharp exploration of race in American literature, specifically the “Africanist presence” in these novels. I am oversimplifying the nuances of her argument here, but, in essence, Morrison argued that the construct of whiteness depended on and responded to the imagining of Blackness. Furthermore, in a society as racialized as the one in the United States, Morrison argued that it would be practically impossible to avoid the influences of race in this nation’s literature, whether one is cognizant of these influences or not. I think the following quote does a great job encapsulating what she was getting at:
The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.
Morrison supplemented her insightful critiques with close readings of various novels, many of them being from the so-called American literary canon. She reframed these white works through a Black lens to demonstrate how Black people (and, more broadly, nonwhite people) have been poorly characterized or, more frequently, entirely shut out from these stories, in spite of the undercurrents of race being ever-present.
Much of Morrison’s explorations complemented academic discourses happening around power dynamics and the construct of the “Other” (i.e., poststructuralism) at the time of this book’s publication, and it certainly helps to have some familiarity with these theoretical framings to further understand the points she wanted to make. Considering this, it wouldn’t surprise me if some people find this book denser than they’d like, but I find that her writing is far more approachable than the theorists who explored similar themes. This is all to say that I really do think it’s worth picking this book up, even if it is a challenge. I do think reading Playing in the Dark some thirty years later makes some of Morrison’s ideas seem “obvious,” but I think there’s still a lot to get out of her thinking and can serve as a good reminder to critically engage with American literature with her points in mind.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery, Racism, and Racial slurs
Moderate: Sexism
Minor: Rape and Death
teddytr19's review against another edition
5.0
How did not one single English teacher have me read this? I literally took an American Lit class at Scripps… ??
neembeam's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
surgical in her precision. the sharpest and most important close readings I've encountered yet. my brain's kinda numb. I'm excited to return to these essays when I've matured as a thinker and reader and writer.