Playing in the Dark
use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify,
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
record them so as to prevent their repetition
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness.
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer.
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
how is “literary whiteness” and “literary blackness” made, and what is the consequence of that construction?
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
Only with Africanist characters is such a project thinkable: delayed gratification for the pleasure of a (white) child.
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
insist that literature is not only “universal” but also “race-free” risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.
Toni Morrison • Playing in the Dark
was interested, as I had been for a long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.