University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series Afro-American Studies

2004

Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark

A Yemisi Jimoh, PhD
University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected]

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Jimoh,, A Yemisi PhD, "Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark" (2004). The Literary Encyclopedia. 91.
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Playing in the Dark:

Whiteness and the
Literary
Imagination
Send to printer

Morrison, Toni
(1992)

A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Domain: Race. Genre: Commentary / Criticism

(literary). Country: United States.

In 1990 Toni Morrison delivered the William E.

Massey Lectures in the History of American
Civilization. The lecture series was revised and
published in May 1992 as a slim volume
titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination. The three essays are
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metacritical explorations into the operations of

whiteness and blackness in the literature of
white writers in the United States. Toni
Morrison takes the position that the existing
literary criticism in the United States has
provided incomplete readings of its canonical
literature and, further, has concealed the
politics informing the practice of critical
literary and cultural analysis itself. She points
especially to the politics of the universal,
which, as she presents it inPlaying in the
Dark, can easily be described as whiteness
universalized, which situates whiteness as
normative, unbiased, undifferentiated, always
already legitimate, and thereby transcendent
and timeless. Morrison’s metacritical approach
is one in which she examines both
longstanding and contemporary practices in
literary criticism in the United States and
endeavours to demonstrate how those
practices illuminate certain aspects of the
literature while evading, in Morrison’s view, a
central aspect of it, “race” or what Toni
Morrison terms an “Africanist Presence.”

Toni Morrison began the public presentation of

her metacritical investigation of the cultural
workings of color in 1988 when she gave the
Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the
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University of Michigan. The lecture was later

published in the Michigan Quarterly
Review as “Unspeakable Things Unspoken:
The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature” and emphasizes the presence and
power of blackness and the black body in
Herman Melville’s writing. In Playing in the
Dark, Morrison extends her earlier discussion
by focusing on the meaning of the presence of
the black body and of blackness in the
literature of four white writers: Willa
Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940),
Edgar Allen Poe’sThe Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym (1838), Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ernest
Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937)
and The Garden of Eden (1986). Throughout
her readings of these narratives, Morrison
critiques a metaphysics of color that she
locates in these writers and in the literary
canon of the United States which has
traditionally been discussed as raceless and
apolitical. Morrison asserts that attempts by
critics to remove politics and race from
intellectual and artistic discussions have cost
literature its energy and life and that such
attempts to remove these crucial issues from
the discussion are, in effect, racialist and
political acts.
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In chapter one of Playing in the Dark,

Morrison argues that a black presence
pervades the United States and is crucial to
shaping its national identity as well as to
developing the nation’s literature. Indeed, the
actual black body or even imagined
Africanisms—she speculates—may be the field
on which, and quite often against which,
characteristics (individualism, morality,
innocence, among others) typically associated
with the literature of the United States as well
as with “Americaness” itself have been
constructed. In this first section of her book,
Toni Morrison shifts the emphasis of the
discussion of race from the impact on those
who suffer as a result of racialized narratives—
literary, social, cultural, and political—to an
emphasis on the impact of racialism on those
who gain privilege and power under implicit as
well as explicit racialist discourses. Willa
Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl functions
as Morrison’s example of the intersections of
power, race, sex, and gender, as Cather in this
novel depicts the actions of a white woman who
uses the black female body in order to gain
power and a sense of identity.

In the second chapter of Playing in the Dark,

Morrison discusses Edgar Allan Poe as an early
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writer whose figurations of an Africanist

Presence in the literature of the United States
is central to our understanding of the concept
of Africanism, a concept which locates the
literature in dread, fear, and haunting rather
than in the later prevailing social narrative of
the United States that is located in optimism,
confidence and newness. Also in her second
chapter, Morrison discusses Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as a critique of the
racialist and classist pretensions of the
antebellum United States and as a book in
which an Africanist Presence is central. That
critique, however, bears on Huck’s (which is to
say the writer Mark Twain’s) inability to
imagine freedom for Jim since freedom in the
United States implies equality. In Morrison’s
reading of Mark Twain’s satirical book, she
finds that freedom from slavery for the black
body must be accompanied by an acceptance of
inferiority.

In Morrison’s third and final chapter

of Playing in the Dark, she insists that race as
metaphor and metaphysics defines much of the
literature of the United States as well as the
nation’s identity and should not be ignored in
literary scholarship and intellectual discourse.
She also asserts that “race” as a metaphor is
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more dangerous than the Enlightenment

concept of biological race. This danger arises
from the ability one has to conceal class conflict
and other social schisms or fears under the
figure of “race.” Ernest Hemingway’s To Have
and to Have Not and The Garden of
Eden provide Morrison with an opportunity to
discuss a writer whose use of the black body in
literature is “unselfconscious”. Morrison
locates two prevalent uses of an Africanist
Presence in Hemingway’s narratives; 1) a black
character that undermines the heroic figure’s
suppositions of strength and power, and
thereby produces fear and dread of the loss of
power or of the truth of impotence 2) the black
male character that takes on the role of the
nurse, a part which in Hemingway’s writing is
typically played by an accommodating and self-
effacing woman. Morrison makes clear that she
views the study of American Africanism as a
project that is not interested in determining
whether or not this body of literature or its
writers are determinedly positioned in
supremacist beliefs and the victimization of the
black body; rather her interest is in how
blackness and the black body have been and
are used to speak the unspeakable about
broader issues through the use of Africanism
or “the fetishizing of color, the transference to
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blackness of the power of illicit sexuality,

chaos, madness, impropriety, anarchy,
strangeness, and helpless, hapless desire.”

Africanism in the literature of the United

States, Morrison points out, is possible
because the Enlightenment easily made a place
for slavery by developing a hierarchy of race at
the same time that it developed its theory of
natural rights, thus in effect excluding black
people from the rights of man. The social
reality of blackness and slavery in the United
States made a rich imaginative terrain on
which white writers could play with blackness
as both the “not-free” and the “not-me”.
Morrison further points out that there is a
European Africanism with its own shapes and
dimensions which is located in colonial
literature.

Morrison’s thinking-through of the operations

of blackness and whiteness in the literature of
the United States in Playing in the
Dark followed her acclaim as the winner of two
of the most prestigious literary prizes, the
Pulitizer Prize for Beloved and the Nobel Prize
in literature, as well as the honour of having
won or been nominated for every major US
literary prize. In 1992, Toni Morrison had a
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total of three books appear in print. In addition

to Playing in the Dark, she published a
collection of essays, Race-ing Justice, En-
gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill,
Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of
Social Reality; her novel Jazz also was
published in that year. Morrison’s seminal
book of literary criticism and theory has
provided her with an additional achievement,
as it was well-received by literary scholars and
reviewers while also increasing interest in a
field of intellectual inquiry that is currently
termed whiteness studies. Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination also
found a place along withJazz on the New York
Times best sellers’ list, placing Toni Morrison
among the few writers to have two books on the
list in different genres, and again confirming
her admirable position as a literary and
scholarly writer whose appeal reaches beyond
university walls.

A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts

Amherst)

First published 02 July 2004, last revised

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2012-03-20
Citation: Jimoh, A Yemisi. "Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination". The Literary
Encyclopedia. 2 July 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?
rec=true&UID=2769, accessed 14 April 2012.]

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