E3W Literature | University of Texas

Toni Morrison
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Vintage Books, 1992
91 pages
$9.00

Reviewed by Patricia Burns

Whiteness studies have become an indispensable part of critical race studies and are now considered integral to literatures concerning colonialism, slavery, industrialism, and other economic and social trends in the United States as well as globally. Understanding whiteness is so crucial to understanding both canonical and non-canonical texts that it is surprising that whiteness as a critical category emerged less than two decades ago. Whiteness studies can be found in diverse fields such as law, art, history, architecture, and literature and comprise a large presence at academic conferences and in college courses throughout these disciplines. Texts by authors such as Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger, Peggy McIntosh, George Lipsitz, and Ian F. Haney López provide a wide understanding of the critical category of whiteness and its applications. Returning to Toni Morrison’s seminal text, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), can help rearticulate the importance of the study of whiteness when teaching the American literary canon as well as reinvigorate scholarly research in the field.

Morrison’s work, simply put, seeks to remind scholars that throughout American history, there has been and will continue to be a large and prominent population of African Americans that at no time were outside the dominant discourse of the nation. While many literary scholars do not deny the presence of African and African American texts in America’s literary heritage, some still find it possible and viable to read white authors as having nothing to do with what Morrison calls the presence of an Africanist influence. As Morrison reminds us in her readings of Edgar Allen Poe, Bernard Bailyn, and Ernest Hemmingway, there need not be names or even humanity assigned to black characters, let alone any black characters at all, for there to be an Africanist presence responsible for metaphors of fear, morality, sexuality, justice, modernization, and so on. Thus Morrison’s work is concerned less with African American texts per se and more with texts created by white authors who may or may not encounter racialized characters in their writing. Morrison tells us, “my project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served.” Morrison adds, claiming that in American literature the characteristics of liberty, industriousness, and individuality, among others, rely on “a real or fabricated Africanist presence [that] was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.” Those engaged in critical race studies must not only recognize the influence of an Africanist presence on canonical American texts, but must also be mindful of the “tacit agreement” that allows individual instructors and departments to ignore this presence. Playing in the Dark revisits the foundation, and therefore the urgency, of this mission: to avoid reifying “white” as normal, default, or “American” and focus instead on how whiteness is constructed through an often unmentioned or unexamined black presence.

In Playing in the Dark, Morrison offers extended readings of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), as well as Hemmingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937) and The Garden of Eden (1986), which are valuable both in their own right and as stepping stones for the numerous scholars who have followed with more in-depth and protracted readings of these texts based on Morrison’s initial premise. But perhaps more valuable than these is Morrison’s reading of the psychology of the early Americas and early American Romance, and the relationship both share with an Africanist presence. “Romance,” writes Morrison, “an exploration of anxiety imported from shadows of European culture, made possible the sometimes safe and other times risky embrace of quite specific, understandably human, fears” of the early Americas. These fears, pervasive in the American Romance of Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, found expression “in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play.” Morrison shares how the presence of a non-free and black population offered “a huge payout of sign, symbol, and agency” for the creation and understanding of a, by comparison, free and white population. For Morrison these metaphors grew to include numerous ambiguities, contradictions, and opposites as they were imbued with “almost anything a country concerns itself with,” asking, “In what public discourse does the reference to black people not exist? It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles.” Here, Morrison’s treatment of the Africanist presence in America goes beyond the literary imagination and stretches to include issues concerning the state, the church, and the body politic.

Young or established scholars may not need to read (or reread) Playing in the Dark to understand the scope and importance of whiteness studies since they have rightly taken a place within the categories of critical race studies, feminism, colonialism, modernism, Marxism, linguistics, rhetoric, and any other category of inquiry that concerns itself with power relations. Yet anyone familiar with Morrison’s writing may want to read (or re-read) Playing in the Dark for its beautiful treatment of so profound an inquiry as the shaping of American values and morality, whiteness, and blackness.