Playing in the Dark HUM 3285: British and American

LiteratureSpring 2011Dr. Perdigao

March 25, 2011

Framing Morrison• Ohioana Book Awards for Fiction for Sula (1975), Paradise (1999), and Love

(2004)

• National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Song of Solomon (1977)

• Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved (1988)

• Nobel Prize in Literature (1993)

• Work as cultural critic

• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1990

Framing Morrison• “I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully

evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; villifying whiteness rather than rectifying it” (Playing in the Dark xi).

• “how is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be ‘humanistic’?” (Playing in the Dark xii-xiii).

Cultural Coding• Morrison states that “Recitatif” “was an experiment in the removal of all racial

codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial” (Playing in the Dark xi).

• Robert J. Patterson’s “Disrupting Racial Discourse”

• “determining racial identities in this text relies on the readers’ ability to (mis)read the cultural referents/codes that Morrison employs throughout” (97).

• Encoding and decoding the text

• Racialize stereotypes, racial clues, and cultural referents to discern their identities

• Markings of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, inflected by race

• Participation in the “formation and circulation of the discourses we are adopting and refuting” (98).

Cultural Decoding• Examining our ideas about racial identity

• Unfixing, denaturalizing, de-essentializing idea of identity (Patterson 99)

• Ideas about “American” identity

• Examples and counterexamples

Take One• Five “acts”

• “it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race” (2819)

• Twyla and Roberta

• “one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny” (2820)

• “Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher” (2820)

Take Two• Hendrix concert (2924)

• “Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world” (2825).

• “A black girl and white girl meeting in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and having nothing to say” (2926).

• “We sat in a booth by the window and fell into recollection like veterans” (2826).

Take Three• Racial strife (2828)

• “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!” (2828).

• “I wonder what made me think you were different” (2829).

• Maggie’s race questioned

• Sign dependent upon Roberta’s

• “nobody understood my signs anyway” (2830)