Mar 9

Mar 9 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

About the book

Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Harvard University Press

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

Buy and support indie bookstores (+ I earn a small commission):
Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My Review

I’m on a mission to deepen my critical reading skills this year. Only a few months into that journey, it became clear that Playing in the Dark was a foundational piece of criticism that I needed to read ASAP if I was going to do the thing right. So I borrowed it from my library, and I’m so glad I did.

This short book (~100 pages), published in 1992, is actually three adapted lectures Morrison gave at Harvard University. Those who have only read Morrison’s fiction might be unprepared for how academic the tone of her nonfiction can be, but she was a genius, so it’s no surprise. Be prepared to take this book slowly to really absorb what she’s saying.

Morrison’s thesis is that all work in the American “canon” is shaped or influenced by an awareness of Black people in American history — what she calls American “Africanism”:

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

Today, in 2025, it doesn’t feel radical (in fact, it feels like critical race theory), but her arguments still made me think about things in new or different ways — and there’s no doubt that this book sharpened my own critical lens.