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The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.
Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."
--Chicago Tribune
"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer."
The New York Times Book Review
- Sales Rank: #51714 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Vintage
- Published on: 1993-07-27
- Released on: 1993-07-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .32" w x 5.20" l, .28 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 91 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Morrison takes a turn as a literary critic, examining the American literary imagination and finding it obsessed with the white/black polarity.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Morrison ( Jazz , LJ 4/15/92) believes that an African American presence, largely ignored by critics, has always permeated white American literature. She opens by carefully setting her parameters and defining her terms--e.g., Africanism: "the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people." The first few pages feature densely packed language whose meaning becomes clearer when Morrison examines such specific works as Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl . This brief, highly provocative book, which considers "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it," is highly recommended not only for Morrison's many admirers but for all those interested in American literature.
-Louis J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn Campus , New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"A profound redefinition of American cultural identity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By DLTS - HCC
Excellent
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating, but left me needing more
By angecan
The first few pages are tough going, if like me, it's been ages since you picked up critical theory.
Once Morrison fleshes out her key assertions, among them “the parasitic nature of white identity” in American literature, the book begins to enthrall. I can’t speak to how much she adds to this critical lens of race because I’m not well read in this area (though she clearly owes a lot to James Snead whom she quotes at length), but I can speak to the accessibility of her ideas and fascinating discoveries. I would add that a psychoanalytic lens is also in play making for many “arching-of-brow-while-nodding-deliberately” moments.
Morrison wants to establish the “American brand of Africanism” reified in canonical texts, and so relies mostly on giants such as Cather, Poe, Melville, Twain and Hemingway. (Styron is as contemporary as she gets.) The text braids three lectures making for a powerful but not overpowering exposure to her ideas, meant to be understood on the first hearing and now reading. Considering the density of the material, I appreciated this lighter treatment, though I would have welcomed more examples.
The following passage summarizes many of her inquiries:
"How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African Americans to do and for the work? As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing “happens”: Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, *there*; and when they were there, they were decorative—displays of the agile writer’s technical expertise. I assumed that since the writer was not black, the appearance of the Africanist characters or narrative or idiom in the work could never be *about* anything other than the “normal,” unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written *for* black people—no more than _Uncle Tom_ was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of the Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It require hard work to not see this."
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A Fascinating Book That Needs to Follow Through
By Dan Mess (roman@muc.muohio.edu)
Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors; her blend of style, fierce intelligence, ambition, daring, and tenderness is rare to find in American authors today. More than anything, Morrison wants to write books that /matter/, that challenge our preconceptions and prejudices and force us to acknowledge our complicity in social problems.
/Playing in the Dark/ is a book that matters. In it, Morrison engages in a fascinating critical project: to trace an "Africanist" presence through American literature and see how people of African descent have been used in literature as ways to talk about freedom, bondage, passion, discipline, class, sex, power... (By "Africanist," Morrison is referring to the "denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people." (p.6-7) ) It's an intriguing, important idea, and one well worth looking into. Morrison offers some generalized thoughts about the matter and also talks about looking at how the Africanist presence in American literature can be seen as a way to, by contrast, construct a portrait of what "whiteness" is supposed to be. She then moves on to some inspired readings of Cather's /Sapphira and the Slave Girl/, Poe's /The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym/, Twain's /Huckleberry Finn/ (perhaps the best of the intrepretations offered), and Hemingway's /To Have and Have Not/ and /The Garden of Eden/.
Unfortunately, this book is simply too short - it's a scant ninety pages. Morrison's ideas entice and seduce us, but it is over all too soon. More case studies ranging over a wider time period in American literature would be helpful. Too, Morrison makes claims that need to be corroborated but aren't in the book. For example, she makes the claim that images of whiteness and paleness usually appear to close a narrative in which there is a strong Africanist presence, saying "They {the images} appear so often and in such particular circumstance that they give pause." (p.33)" All well and good, but she gives us no more than the solitary example of /The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym./
This book is still definitely worth looking into for anyone interested in race and American fiction. It's just too bad that Morrison could not have delineated her ideas more fully.
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