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Title: Playing In The Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0-679-74542-4 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 July, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Leave the reducing for the experts
Comment: If Morrison is playing in the dark, then indeed there are those who are angry in the light, so to give a negative reduction of what morrison was clearly stating about how blacks are viewed speaks in high volume, besides i dont know of many japanese who pinpointed out black ppl to enslave them............. even if they did have three eyes, two mouths, or whatever else. lol Another prime example that denial always ends with a bad term......... More emotional baggage disguised as constructive critism..........yawn....................
Rating: 2
Summary: More Heat than Light
Comment: Playing in the Dark is a revelation, but not the one intended by its author. What is revealed mainly is just how close to hopeless race relations in this country have come to be. Here we have a writer of nearly undisputed stature, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who yet cannot summon objectivity on the subject of race, and who offers what seems essentially a bit of personal venting disguised as a serious academic proposal. Not that there isn't an interesting idea at the core of the book, but it's offered up as far more grand than it is, and with such thorough disingenuousness that the reader's main focus is changed very early on from an evaluation of her idea to a voyeuristic obsessing about Ms. Morrison's indecent exposure. Why would she let this book be printed?
The author's claimed intention is stated relatively plainly: "...to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions." (Page 11.) But much of the book reads for all the world like the work of a sophomore who has learned that her instructor fancies Martin Heidegger and who has checked out a translation of Being and Time to serve as a model for her first essay. Here's a fairly typical example: "For excellent reasons of state - because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country - the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony." (Page 8.) This is the writing of a Nobel laureate? Heidegger's writing was required, it seems to me, by his inaccessible subject; by comparison, Ms. Morrison's subject is elementary.
This is not to say that the author doesn't occasionally reach the levels of creative expression for which she is justly so well known, it's just that in this work her gift seems impotent against her anger. Try though she does to disguise her feelings ("My project rises from delight, not disappointment." Page 4.), it doesn't work, and its failure manifests itself in the oddest ways ("It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color "meant" something.... One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes or one ear, the significance of that difference from the smaller but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have meaning." Page 49. Presumably the Japanese would have been, racially, even less appropriate as slave owners).
It seems, finally, that it is Ms. Morrison who is playing in the dark. She senses it, but she can't find the words to say it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Morrison offers "food" for the thought processes!
Comment: I always felt that to truly say that one is literate is to be able to state equivocally that one has read a book by Toni Morrison or Stephen Hawking. Sure, Aristotle and Shakespeare are giants, but they were from ages ago. Morrison and Hawking are contemporary thinkers.
Instead of dealing with Morrison the storyteller, I chose to read Morrison the academic analyst in the form of "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination". And, boy, could I not have chosen a more challenging book.
Morrison skillfully directs the reader's attention to how American literature abounds with overt and/or covert attempts to perpetuate the white male's superiority and the black man's inferiority. She shows how the "Africanist" influence can be found in the respective characters, their dialogues, and their interaction with their white counterparts. By citing examples from Hemingway, Poe, and Cather, the author makes a reader contemplate the author's symbolism and intent. I know that I will look at "great" American works with increased scrutiny.
I wish that she had tackled Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind".
As one of America's most respected writers and a proponent of civil and women's rights, Miss Morrison uses her talent wisely here in this riveting exposé.
Mind you, there are a few words that not even the context will reveal their meanings; therefore, a dictionary would be handy to have around. But, the "research" is well worth it for the book is a feast for the mind.
Bring on Stephen now!
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Title: Love by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0375409440 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 28 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Jazz (Plume Contemporary Fiction) by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452269652 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452260116 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: September, 1987 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Paradise by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452280397 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Beloved by Toni Morrison ISBN: 0452280621 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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