Playing in the Dark Quotes

“As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“These remarks should not be interpreted as simply an effort to move the gaze of African-American studies to a different site. I do not want to alter one hierarchy in order to institute another. It is true that I do not want to encourage those totalizing approaches to African-American scholarship which have no drive other than the exchange of dominations—dominant Eurocentric scholarship replaced by dominant Afrocentric scholarship. More interesting is what makes intellectual domination possible; how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest to revelation and choice; what ignites and informs the literary imagination, and what forces help establish the parameters of criticism.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

“As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an 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 requires hard work not to see this.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal’s “possession” as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been... in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“Writing and reading are not all that distant for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and responsibility.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“Der Afrikanismus ist das Vehikel, durch das sich das amerikanische Ich als nicht versklavt, sondern frei erfährt, als nicht abstoßend, sondern begehrenswert, nicht hilflos, sondern priviligiert und mächtig, nicht geschichtslos sondern geschichtlich, nicht verdammt, sondern unschuldig, nicht ein blinder Zufall der Evolution, sondern fortschrittliche Erfüllung eines Schicksal.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness self off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“...Being simply illustrations, of how each of us reads, becomes engaged in and watches what is being read all at the same time.”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“specular”
― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark