Reflection – Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Reflection

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Preface (1992)

Consider one or more of the following passages:

“I remember smiling when I read that, partly in admiration of the clarity in her recollection of the music—its immediacy—partly because of what leaped into my mind: what on earth was Louie playing that night? What was there in his music that drove this sensitive young girl hyperventilating into the street to be struck by the beauty and ravage of a camellia ‘svelte in appearance but torn apart inside’?” (vii).

“I was interested, as I had been for a long time, 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.

“The Louis Armstrong catalyst was an addition to this file, and encouraged me to reflect on the consequences of jazz—its visceral, emotional, and intellectual impact on the listener” (viii).

“The principal reason these matters loom large for me is that I do not have quite the same access to these traditionally useful constructs of blackness. Neither blackness nor ‘people of color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people and language which are by no means marginal or already completely known and knowable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sinister, frequently lazy, almost predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains” (x-xi).

“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free?” (xii).

“Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. When this world view is taken seriously as agency, the literature produced within it and without it offers an unprecedented opportunity to comprehend the resilience and gravity, the inadequacy and the force of the imaginative act” (xiii).

“Over and over again I am amazed by the treasure trove that American literature is. How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art. How stunning is the achievement of those who have searched for and mined a shareable language for the words to say it.” (xiii) Within the context of the complete Preface, consider Morrison’s words, engage with the text, reflect, and elaborate your viewpoint in 500 words.

Explanation & Answer

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