2.19 - Toni Morrison, *Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination* (1992)

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

2.19 - Toni Morrison, *Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination* (1992)

This is a fascinating exercise in literary analysis - looking at how blackness functions in American literature.

I'll quote Morrison, because she writes so beautifully even when not writing fiction.

'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 these 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....

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. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery. A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.' (p.12)