Rating: 
Summary: Very Enlightening
Review: An excellent monograph discussing the African presence in pieces of liturature, particularly early American literature, that were previously thought to be void of such refrerences. She also offers some very interesting insights on the true motives of slavery and race relations.
Rating:
Summary: Leave the reducing for the experts
Review: I always felt that to truly say that one is literate is to be able to state equivocally that one has read a book by Toni Morrison or Stephen Hawking. Sure, Aristotle and Shakespeare are giants, but they were from ages ago. Morrison and Hawking are contemporary thinkers.Instead of dealing with Morrison the storyteller, I chose to read Morrison the academic analyst in the form of "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination". And, boy, could I not have chosen a more challenging book. Morrison skillfully directs the reader's attention to how American literature abounds with overt and/or covert attempts to perpetuate the white male's superiority and the black man's inferiority. She shows how the "Africanist" influence can be found in the respective characters, their dialogues, and their interaction with their white counterparts. By citing examples from Hemingway, Poe, and Cather, the author makes a reader contemplate the author's symbolism and intent. I know that I will look at "great" American works with increased scrutiny. I wish that she had tackled Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind". As one of America's most respected writers and a proponent of civil and women's rights, Miss Morrison uses her talent wisely here in this riveting exposé. Mind you, there are a few words that not even the context will reveal their meanings; therefore, a dictionary would be handy to have around. But, the "research" is well worth it for the book is a feast for the mind. Bring on Stephen now!
Rating:
Summary: Morrison offers "food" for the thought processes!
Review: I always felt that to truly say that one is literate is to be able to state equivocally that one has read a book by Toni Morrison or Stephen Hawking. Sure, Aristotle and Shakespeare are giants, but they were from ages ago. Morrison and Hawking are contemporary thinkers. Instead of dealing with Morrison the storyteller, I chose to read Morrison the academic analyst in the form of "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination". And, boy, could I not have chosen a more challenging book. Morrison skillfully directs the reader's attention to how American literature abounds with overt and/or covert attempts to perpetuate the white male's superiority and the black man's inferiority. She shows how the "Africanist" influence can be found in the respective characters, their dialogues, and their interaction with their white counterparts. By citing examples from Hemingway, Poe, and Cather, the author makes a reader contemplate the author's symbolism and intent. I know that I will look at "great" American works with increased scrutiny. I wish that she had tackled Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind". As one of America's most respected writers and a proponent of civil and women's rights, Miss Morrison uses her talent wisely here in this riveting exposé. Mind you, there are a few words that not even the context will reveal their meanings; therefore, a dictionary would be handy to have around. But, the "research" is well worth it for the book is a feast for the mind. Bring on Stephen now!
Rating:
Summary: Leave the reducing for the experts
Review: If Morrison is playing in the dark, then indeed there are those who are angry in the light, so to give a negative reduction of what morrison was clearly stating about how blacks are viewed speaks in high volume, besides i dont know of many japanese who pinpointed out black ppl to enslave them............. even if they did have three eyes, two mouths, or whatever else. lol Another prime example that denial always ends with a bad term......... More emotional baggage disguised as constructive critism..........yawn....................
Rating:
Summary: Morrison's insights on race are sharp, undeniable
Review: In a language that yields great insight after struggle, Morrison does a terrific job of providing scholars a reason to discuss race, color, and nationality as central factors in "American" literature. The fact that nonwhite characters (not to mention nonwhite writers) have been so ignored is because questions of personal and national identity have been considered too particular, too political for discussions based upon (solipsistic) universality. The implication, then, is that black people have no personhood, because their very individuality particularizes them out of academic, though not physical, existence. Morrison shows how crucial the acceptance and reproduction of pathological reactions to racial difference are to the formation of American literature and the attainment of American citizenship. She shows that figures and symbols of racial difference affect internal textual issues of plot, setting, theme, character, and point of view and attendant issues of a character's authority and the appearance of a text's "realism." From her springboard, one may also look for configurations of racial difference in everything from philosophy to crimonology. Her account seeks not to censor but to enlarge the debate about America's "great" texts.
Rating: 
Summary: Selling Out Huck -- And Kissing Up To Scarlett
Review: It's not surprising that a black feminist author would want to trash the "dead white guys" who made American literature. What is interesting is the phony way Toni Morrison wants to hang racism solely on white men, never on white women. She spends page after page trying to dig up dirt on masculine writers like Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, while entirely ignoring the far more poisonous racism of white women like Margaret Mitchell and Edith Wharton.
Toni Morrison feels threatened by Huck Finn -- enough to trash him good -- and not at all threatened by Scarlett O'Hara. This is interesting. After all, Huck Finn risks his life to set a black man free, while Scarlett is an unrepentant slaveowner who feeds off black suffering like a parasite. So why is it that Scarlett gets a pass while Huck gets jumped on like a white jogger in Central Park?
Perhaps the problem is that Mark Twain isn't really attacking racism so much as he's attacking respectability. Twain suggests that it's the hunger for wealth, status, comfort, and respectability that causes people to mistreat others -- and that well-bred Widow Douglas is no better than white trash Pap Finn.
What Morrison resents is not that Twain is too tough on Nigger Jim, but that he's too tough on the Widow Douglas. It seems clear that Morrison doesn't want to be free in the sense that runaway Jim is free -- that is, to be able to come and go as she pleases and think her own thoughts. Secretly, she wants to be "free" in the way that Widow Douglas and Scarlett O'hara are free. She wants the life of luxury and privilege that the white ladies she secretly admires have always had. She'd rather pal around with rich white "ladies" like Mary Gordon (who is under the Barnard veneer the worst sort of shanty Irish bigot) than with trash like the black men now serving in Iraq. And she's perfectly willing to sell the trash down the river to do it, be they white or black.
Rating:
Summary: More Heat than Light
Review: Playing in the Dark is a revelation, but not the one intended by its author. What is revealed mainly is just how close to hopeless race relations in this country have come to be. Here we have a writer of nearly undisputed stature, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who yet cannot summon objectivity on the subject of race, and who offers what seems essentially a bit of personal venting disguised as a serious academic proposal. Not that there isn't an interesting idea at the core of the book, but it's offered up as far more grand than it is, and with such thorough disingenuousness that the reader's main focus is changed very early on from an evaluation of her idea to a voyeuristic obsessing about Ms. Morrison's indecent exposure. Why would she let this book be printed? The author's claimed intention is stated relatively plainly: "...to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions." (Page 11.) But much of the book reads for all the world like the work of a sophomore who has learned that her instructor fancies Martin Heidegger and who has checked out a translation of Being and Time to serve as a model for her first essay. Here's a fairly typical example: "For excellent reasons of state - because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country - the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony." (Page 8.) This is the writing of a Nobel laureate? Heidegger's writing was required, it seems to me, by his inaccessible subject; by comparison, Ms. Morrison's subject is elementary. This is not to say that the author doesn't occasionally reach the levels of creative expression for which she is justly so well known, it's just that in this work her gift seems impotent against her anger. Try though she does to disguise her feelings ("My project rises from delight, not disappointment." Page 4.), it doesn't work, and its failure manifests itself in the oddest ways ("It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color "meant" something.... One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes or one ear, the significance of that difference from the smaller but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have meaning." Page 49. Presumably the Japanese would have been, racially, even less appropriate as slave owners). It seems, finally, that it is Ms. Morrison who is playing in the dark. She senses it, but she can't find the words to say it.
Rating:
Summary: Eye Opening
Review: Playing in the Dark is without a doubt, the most informative critique of the use of the African American presence in American literature. Morrison critiques the work of some of the most famous American novelist and points out how their work is influenced by blackness. Her critique is sharp and forthright. She challenges writers and critics alike to reevaluate their use of language, coding, and imagery as it relates to characters or situations of an "Africanist" nature. The critique identifies specific instances where negative imagery and characterizations are used by writers to help solidify whatever point being made, or image being created. Playing in the Dark should be required reading for any literature curriculum and any critic or writer who dare place pen to paper in an effort to inform or enlighten the reading public.
Rating:
Summary: Eye Opening
Review: Playing in the Dark is without a doubt, the most informative critique of the use of the African American presence in American literature. Morrison critiques the work of some of the most famous American novelist and points out how their work is influenced by blackness. Her critique is sharp and forthright. She challenges writers and critics alike to reevaluate their use of language, coding, and imagery as it relates to characters or situations of an "Africanist" nature. The critique identifies specific instances where negative imagery and characterizations are used by writers to help solidify whatever point being made, or image being created. Playing in the Dark should be required reading for any literature curriculum and any critic or writer who dare place pen to paper in an effort to inform or enlighten the reading public.
Rating:
Summary: Finding light in the darkest of regions.
Review: The vital importance of "Africanism" to the construction of "whiteness" in America has for too long gone ackowledged. Fortunately, Toni Morrison has taken the first step towards the erasure of this disgusting continuation of "sidelining" a black presence that, as Morrison clearly points out in in this illuminating monograph, has served as the building block in the long self-definition process of Americas and its literature. A brilliantly titled, written, and executed ninety pages, "Playing in the dark" demands reading from anyone remotely interested in the formation of America's founding literature and cultural ideologies. If anyone can tackle this subject, it is Toni Morrison, and she does so with a lucidity neccesassy when "playing in the dark." Daniel A. Jacome Tufts University
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