Playing in the Dark

by Toni Morrison

There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called “the power of blackness,” especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated. The slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and

Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery.

It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.

Eventually individualism fuses with the prototype of Americans as solitary, alienated, and malcontent. What, one wants to ask, are Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently innocent of? Different from? As for absolute power, over whom is this power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed?

Statements to the contrary, insisting on the meaninglessness of race to the American identity, are themselves full of meaning.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color “meant” something.

How could one speak of profit, economy, labor, progress, suffragism, Christianity, the frontier, the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, education, transportation (freight and passengers), neighborhoods, the military—of almost anything a country concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse, at the heart of definition, the presence of Africans and their descendants?

First, the Africanist character as surrogate and enabler.

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.

Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or, in a later period, to signal modernity.

how it serves as a marker and vehicle for illegal sexuality, fear of madness, expulsion, self-loathing. Finally,

modernism—to being hip, sophisticated, ultra-urbane.

there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim.

metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy definitive places in American literature, in the “national” character, and ought to be a major concern of the literary scholarship that tries to know it.

The presence of black people is not only a major referent in the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate.

The characteristic figures of racial division repeat on the level of phoneme, sentence, and story:

Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so.

two main categories of speech for the black man: grumbles and apology. But

illicit sexuality, chaos, madness, impropriety, anarchy, strangeness, and helpless, hapless desire—provides

association of blackness with strangeness, with taboo—understands also that blackness is something one can “have” or appropriate;

Africa, imagined as innocent and under white control, is the inner story; Africanism, imagined as evil, chaotic, impenetrable, is the outer story.

Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanist presence and personae have been constructed—invented—in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served.

My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served.