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Bryce Madrid
Race & Social Justice
Lo
November 2015
Reading Questions: Playing in the Dark
Author Toni Morrison in her article, Playing in the Dark, identifies issues
and affects pertaining to American literature; specifically how whiteness and
blackness is set-up within the literature.
Through out chapters one and two, Morrison analyzes the works of
Flannery O'Connor, Willa Cather, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Readers
are briefly given an explanation that Morrison is analyzing the ways writers
transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language, and the
ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debates
blanketed in their text" (Morrison 4). The author is concerned with the overly
expressed invented Africa(Morrison 7) and the lack of true African
representation. This being an issue to Morrison in which she proposes that a
relationship between racism and the writers in which writers are a sequential
influence on societys view of race. Concluding this issue, Morrison puts this
issue to rest by stating self-reflective nature of these encounters with
Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness can be evil and protective,
rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable(Morrison 59). What Morrison
is truly saying is it is hard to criticize the issue within the works of literature
and that her plea ultimately goes to the authors of the works of writing.

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Another issue Morrison brings about through the working of Bernard
Bailyn's "Voyagers to the West" and that issue is evasion of race. In Bailyns
work, a process of a European settlers becoming Americans. This work of
writing is critical because it allows for Morrison to identify the issue at hand
when it is said:
a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force
that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he
emerged a distinctive new man a borderland gentleman, a man of
property in a raw, half-savage world(Morrison 43).
To conclude her thoughts on this issue, Morrison expresses that nineteenth
century writer were aware of the presence of African Americans thus through
writing conveying the troubles of that presence.
My thoughts on this reading were that Toni Morrison was very focused
on her argument of race within literature and she provided analysis through
strong evidence. However, though she was focused on one argument, her
work could have applied to issues more than just race. Her work could have
applied to issues of feminism or gender. Throughout the text, there are many
statements of "white male views, genius, and power"(Morrison 5) or how
free I can be as an African American woman writer in my genderized,
sexualized, wholly racialized world.(Morrison 4). Another thing I think about
her argument is that it is weakened by the fact that she only focuses
specifically on African Americans and not other racial groups.

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