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Oct. 27th, 2009 12:23 pmThe 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!
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!
