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Playing In The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
by Toni Morrison
by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's three lectures in this book deal with the polarity between white and black characters in American literature, racial insights and constructs a definition of what "whiteness" means.
What happens is Morrison spends considerable amount of space discussing how each mention of the word "white" in a novel is intentional, and how Jim in Huckleberry Finn is treated so poorly. She tries to take an interesting approach showing the white/black balance in literature, but winds up discussing some dead white guys (Poe, Twain, Hemingway), all of whom have been discussed to some extent their beliefs and opinions on racial issues. The only variation to Morrison's lectures is the inclusion of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
Perhaps what would have made the argument and hypothesis stronger would have been to discuss black writers as well, showing the white/black polarity from a black writer's perspective. Instead what happens is a sort of attack on the dead white guys which, while I'm not 100% opposed to the idea, has already been done and then some. I was expecting a new insight into literature and the people who write it, but found Morrison did not seem to have given her lectures the attention it deserved, causing them to fall just short of being really impressive.
Not a horrible bit of literary criticism, but very one-sided - too much so for a black feminist writer who published these lectures in the 90s.
What happens is Morrison spends considerable amount of space discussing how each mention of the word "white" in a novel is intentional, and how Jim in Huckleberry Finn is treated so poorly. She tries to take an interesting approach showing the white/black balance in literature, but winds up discussing some dead white guys (Poe, Twain, Hemingway), all of whom have been discussed to some extent their beliefs and opinions on racial issues. The only variation to Morrison's lectures is the inclusion of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
Perhaps what would have made the argument and hypothesis stronger would have been to discuss black writers as well, showing the white/black polarity from a black writer's perspective. Instead what happens is a sort of attack on the dead white guys which, while I'm not 100% opposed to the idea, has already been done and then some. I was expecting a new insight into literature and the people who write it, but found Morrison did not seem to have given her lectures the attention it deserved, causing them to fall just short of being really impressive.
Not a horrible bit of literary criticism, but very one-sided - too much so for a black feminist writer who published these lectures in the 90s.
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Ellen
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rated it 4 stars
Dec 09, 2009 08:04am
I liked Morrison's book better than you, and I'm a crabby reviewer :). Morrison does indeed spend most of the book discussing dead white guys, but I thought her point about the way in which blackness shaped our (white) literary imagination was provocative and interesting.
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It was definitely interesting, but I didn't think it was all that original. So while the text is written well, I felt she could have taken her lectures to another level and told me something I didn't already know. That's the reason I could only give it 2 stars.Or maybe I was just particularly crabby the day I reviewed this one. :)
