playing in the dark

quotes by toni morrison from playing in the dark

"criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant withing a human landscape. . . what africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary 'blackness,' the nature - even the cause - of literary 'whiteness.'"

"the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. the languages they use and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitations."

"there is no romance free of what herman melville called 'the power of blackness,' especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated. the 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. this black population was available for meditations on terror - the terror of european outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed."

"what i wish to examine is how the image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in american literature as an africanist persona. i want to show how the duties of that persona - duties of exorcism and reification and mirroring - are on demand and on display throughout much of the literature of the country."

"eventually individualism fuses with the prototype of americans as solitary, alienated, and malcontent. what, one wants to ask, are americans alienated from? what are americans always so insistently innocent of? different from? as for absolute power, over whom is this power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed?"

"even, and especially, when american texts are not 'about' africanist presences or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation. . . for the settlers and for american writers generally, this africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power."

"in what ways does the imaginative encounter with africanism enable white writers to think about themselves? . . . the technical ways in which an africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. we need studies that analyze the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters."

"poe meditates on place as a means of containing the fear of borderlessness and trespass, but also as a means of releasing and exploring the desire for a limitless empty frontier. consider the ways that africanism in other american writers (mark twain, melville, hawthorne) serves as a vehicle for regulating love and the imagination as defenses against the psychic costs of guilt and despair. africanism is the vehicle by which the american self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny."


"fetishization. . . this is especially useful in evoking erotic fears or desires and establishing fixed and major difference where difference does not exist or is minimal. blood, for example, is a pervasive fetish: black blood, white blood, the purity of blood; the purity of white female sexuality, the pollution of african blood and sex. fetishization is a strategy often used to assert the categorical absolutism of civilization and savagery."

"eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so."

"if we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable - all of the self-contradictory features of the self. whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. or so our writers seem to say."

"individualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency. freedom (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced."