Dan Jackson & Matt Barrick
Playing in the Dark is really a review of the interactions between Europeans and people of color within the context of literature in the United States. Morrison really shows how African American characters in novels written in this country have been given a distinct role, an almost repetitive one. Morrison observes how the roles given to black characters has formed black society to this point in history. Morrison also observes how distinct culture brought by African Americans has enriched and changed the overall form of American literature across the board.
As Morrison explains, by the time such characters enter the storyline, their race has become "metaphorical" (63). It no longer demarcates solely ancestry or ethnic background, but instead, she contends, it becomes "a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological 'race' ever was" (63). Textual strategies such as stereotyping, displacement, condensation, fetishization, and allegory (67-69) load the racial identity of Africans with various meanings and significances for the European population that biological race on its own could never hold. Eventually, a full blown social construction of race is achieved wherein, on the one hand, European peoples are seen as "non-raced," while on the other, African peoples are "raced" and thus bound in identity to the attendant meanings of their darker skin.
Morrison's lectures in this book address mainly the issues surrounding white and black people in literature and the term we talked about in class, what it means to be white; "Whiteness". Morrison also dives into how black characterization repeats and finds itself being forced on writers both black and white due to the time period and expectation.
Faulkner and Morrison fused (http://eserver.org/clogic/2002/images/morifaulk.gif)
This link is a interesting interview with Morrison and her discussion general overtones of her many works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5D5PLI7kvc&feature=related
Thanks for the posting. What an interesting final image you choose to end on. What do you think the significance of such an image is--can you do a close reading of it?
ReplyDeleteYou provide a nice, general summary of this text, though I think you might be leaving out many of Morrison's finer points that you may have been able to explore, had the posting been up to the required length. How do you think others have responded to the ideas put forth in Playing in the Dark? How can these ideas be applied to our culture? Do you agree or disagree. I would have liked a bit more of your original ideas regarding the work.