The History, Memory, and Past of Racial Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark

This essay examines the critical assessment of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark within recent debates over the practice and value of (American) literary studies. In advocating formalist and reparative reading practices, certain scholars have relegated Morrison to an opposing hermeneutic tradition characterized by a “suspicious” approach to literary texts and other cultural mediums. My claim is that this now commonplace characterization of Morrison overlooks her critical endeavor to question the presuppositions and prerogatives of (literary) historicism. Throughout her close readings of canonical white American authors, Morrison interrogates the categories of history, memory, and the past by which we conceptualize both racial slavery and American literature as objects of study. Instead of a myopic concern with whether or not a given author of a given time period was racist, that is, Playing in the Dark is driven by an inquiry into the imperative terms of whiteness and Blackness which provide temporal and racial coherence to an (African) American literary canon.

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Work Title The History, Memory, and Past of Racial Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark
Subtitle or, The Literary Canon and/as the Human
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Open Access
Creators
  1. Kevin Pyon
License In Copyright (Rights Reserved)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. Early American Literature
Publication Date August 24, 2024
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a934207
Deposited January 28, 2025

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