Literary Criticism In Toni Morrison's Playing In The Dark?

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 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

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:

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. 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