(no subject)

[skygiants]

The book I did not have the brain to review on Friday was Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. I am not sure I really have the brain to review it today either - I mean, in the grand scale of things, Toni Morrison's brain is JUPITER and mine is, like, a medium-sized asteroid on a good day - but I will do my best!

From what I understand, this is kind of a written-up version of three lectures analyzing and critiquing both the use of black characters and "blackness" in early American literature, and the absence of other criticism looking at this. The last part is kind of the mos significant to her, I think. I mean, over the course of the book, she makes a lot of really good points about the purposes that black characters served for these white American authors -one of her main arguments is that in order to write the (white) "American identity" of freedom, liberty and potential, you need the presence of a decisively non-free population to contrast it against, which is fascinating - but the actual literary analysis often takes a backseat to her arguments for more of this kind of study. At its most basic, her argument revolves around the point that too many scholars kind of uncomfortably gloss over the black presence in these books because they feel too awkward to write about it and therefore pretend it doesn't exist, which does nobody any good at all.

Me, because I am a lit-dork, I wanted more actual specific textual criticism than there was, but that is in no way to put down the importance of her arguments in favor of the kind of criticism that she wants to see. I mean, I want to see it too; that is why I picked up the book!

Comments

[ceitfianna]

That sounds like an interesting read. We keep discussing a lot of how do you deal with race and cultural sensitivity in my children's literature class just mainly in terms of picking books that do a good job of showing and honoring cultural differences. I might have to go search this out.

[skygiants]

It's definitely a worthwhile read for anybody, I think. (Though it's not really the same issues you're talking about in class, I believe - this is much less focused on providing more textual representation and more about analyzing what's already there and what that says about underlying attitudes.)

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

in order to write the (white) "American identity" of freedom, liberty and potential, you need the presence of a decisively non-free population to contrast it against, which is fascinating

Oh! I have never thought about that before, but it makes so much sense.

[skygiants]

I know, right? Proof once again that Toni Morrison's brain is Jupiter-sized!