Toni Morrison Playing In The Dark

  toni morrison playing in the dark: Playing in the Dark Toni Morrison, 2007-07-24 An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison reimagines and remaps the possibility of America. Her brilliant discussions of the Africanist presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Playing in the Dark Toni Morrison, 1992 Morrison brings her genius to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a perspective sure to alter conventional notions about American literature.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Playing In The Dark Toni Morrison, 1993-07-27 An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison reimagines and remaps the possibility of America. Her brilliant discussions of the Africanist presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: An Analysis of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark Karina Jakubowicz, Adam Perchard, 2017-07-05 Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation. Interpretation plays a vital role in critical thinking: it focuses on interrogating accepted meanings and laying down clear definitions on which a strong argument can be built. Both history and literary history in the US have frequently revolved around understanding how Americans define themselves and each other, and Morrison’s work seeks to investigate, question, and redefine one of the central concepts in American history and American literary history: color.. Morrison turned to the classics of American literature to ask how authors had chosen to define the terms ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Instead of accepting traditional interpretations of these works, Morrison examined the way in which ‘whiteness’ defines itself through ‘blackness,’ and vice versa. Black bondage and the myths of black inferiority and savagery, she showed, allowed white America to indulge its own defining myths – viewing itself as free, civilized, and innocent. A classic of subtle and incisive interpretation, Playing in the Dark shows just how crucial and how complex simple-looking definitions can be.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The Origin of Others Toni Morrison, 2017-09-18 What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America’s foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Toni Morrison Carmen Gillespie, 2012 Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison Justine Tally, 2007-09-13 Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Pym: A Novel Mat Johnson, 2012-09-04 “THE SHARPEST AND MOST UNUSUAL STORY I READ LAST YEAR . . . [Mat] Johnson’s satirical vision roves as freely as Kurt Vonnegut’s and is colored with the same sort of passionate humanitarianism.”—Maud Newton, New York Times Magazine NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Vanity Fair • Houston Chronicle • The Seattle Times • Salon • National Post • The A.V. Club Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes has just made a startling discovery: the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that confirms the reality of Edgar Allan Poe’s strange and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Determined to seek out Tsalal, the remote island of pure and utter blackness that Poe describes, Jaynes convenes an all-black crew of six to follow Pym’s trail to the South Pole, armed with little but the firsthand account from which Poe derived his seafaring tale, a bag of bones, and a stash of Little Debbie snack cakes. Thus begins an epic journey by an unlikely band of adventurers under the permafrost of Antarctica, beneath the surface of American history, and behind one of literature’s great mysteries. “Outrageously entertaining, [Pym] brilliantly re-imagines and extends Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic and unsettling Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. . . . Part social satire, part meditation on race in America, part metafiction and, just as important, a rollicking fantasy adventure . . . reminiscent of Philip Roth in its seemingly effortless blend of the serious, comic and fantastic.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “Blisteringly funny.”—Laura Miller, Salon “Relentlessly entertaining.”—The New York Times Book Review “Imagine Kurt Vonnegut having a beer with Ralph Ellison and Jules Verne.”—Vanity Fair “Screamingly funny . . . Reading Pym is like opening a big can of whoop-ass and then marveling—gleefully—at all the mayhem that ensues.”—Houston Chronicle
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Generations Lucille Clifton, 2021-11-16 A moving family biography in which the poet traces her family history back through Jim Crow, the slave trade, and all the way to the women of the Dahomey people in West Africa. Buffalo, New York. A father’s funeral. Memory. In Generations, Lucille Clifton’s formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, “born among the Dahomey people in 1822,” who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the author’s grandmother. Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. “I look at my husband,” Clifton writes, “and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.”
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Conversations with Toni Morrison Toni Morrison, 1994 Collected interviews with the Nobel Prize winner in which she describes herself as an African American writer and that show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The Source of Self-Regard Toni Morrison, 2020-01-14 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: A Mercy Toni Morrison, 2009-08-11 A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: God Help the Child Toni Morrison, 2015-04-21 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Notable Book • This fiery and provocative novel from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.” “Powerful.... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Goodness and the Literary Imagination Toni Morrison, 2019-10-01 What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Home Toni Morrison, 2012-05-08 The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding himself--and his home.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: What Moves at the Margin Toni Morrison, 2008 Collecting three decades of Morrison's writings about her work, life, literature, and American society, this collection provides a unique glimpse into her viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Sula Toni Morrison, 2002-04-05 Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Toni Morrison Toni Morrison, 2008 Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and other novels
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Black on White David R. Roediger, 2010-03-31 In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America? From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society. Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called the ways of white folks illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Breathe Imani Perry, 2019-09-17 2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist 2020 NAACP Image Award Nominee - Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction) Best-of Lists: Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · 25 Can't-Miss Books of 2019 (The Undefeated) Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love—finding beauty and possibility in life—and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition. Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools. With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes, Breathe offers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Paradise Toni Morrison, 2014-03-11 The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The Dancing Mind Toni Morrison, 2007-07-24 On the occasion of her acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the sixth of November, 1996, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison speaks with brevity and passion to the pleasures, the difficulties, the necessities, of the reading/writing life in our time. She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truthteller. —Oprah Winfrey
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Reading Toni Morrison Rachel Lister, 2009
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Anne Sexton Diane Middlebrook, 1992-10-27 Anne Sexton began writing poetry at the age of twenty-nine to keep from killing herself. She held on to language for dear life and somehow -- in spite of alcoholism and the mental illness that ultimately led her to suicide -- managed to create a body of work that won a Pulitzer Prize and that still sings to thousands of readers. This exemplary biography, which was nominated for the National Book Award, provoked controversy for its revelations of infidelity and incest and its use of tapes from Sexton's psychiatric sessions. It reconciles the many Anne Sextons: the 1950s housewife; the abused child who became an abusive mother; the seductress; the suicide who carried kill-me pills in her handbag the way other women carry lipstick; and the poet who transmuted confession into lasting art.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The Black Book Middleton A. Harris, Ernest Smith, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, 2019-12-03 A new edition of the classic New York Times bestseller edited by Toni Morrison, offering an encyclopedic look at the black experience in America from 1619 through the 1940s with the original cover restored. “I am so pleased the book is alive again. I still think there is no other work that tells and visualizes a story of such misery with seriousness, humor, grace and triumph.”—Toni Morrison Seventeenth-century sketches of Africans as they appeared to marauding European traders. Nineteenth-century slave auction notices. Twentieth-century sheet music for work songs and freedom chants. Photographs of war heroes, regal in uniform. Antebellum reward posters for capturing runaway slaves. An 1856 article titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child.” In 1974, Middleton A. Harris and Toni Morrison led a team of gifted, passionate collectors in compiling these images and nearly five hundred others into one sensational narrative of the black experience in America—The Black Book. Now in a newly restored hardcover edition, The Black Book remains a breathtaking testament to the legendary wisdom, strength, and perseverance of black men and women intent on freedom. Prominent collectors Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith joined Harris and Morrison (then a Random House editor, ultimately a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Nobel Laureate) to spend months studying, laughing at, and crying over these materials—transcripts from fugitive slaves’ trials and proclamations by Frederick Douglass and celebrated abolitionists, as well as chilling images of cross burnings and lynchings, patents registered by black inventors throughout the early twentieth century, and vibrant posters from “Black Hollywood” films of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, it was an article she found while researching this project that provided the inspiration for Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved. A labor of love and a vital link to the richness and diversity of African American history and culture, The Black Book honors the past, reminding us where our nation has been, and gives flight to our hopes for what is yet to come. Beautifully and faithfully presented and featuring a foreword and original poem by Toni Morrison, The Black Book remains a timeless landmark work.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Love Toni Morrison, 2023-09-07 VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIESSpine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics.A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved.May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed wit[Bokinfo].
  toni morrison playing in the dark: A Stranger's Journey David Mura, 2018 Long recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA, the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA, with A Stranger's Journey, David Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as James Baldwin, ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Garrett Hongo, while making compelling connections to Mura's own life and work as a Japanese American writer. In A Stranger's Journey, Mura poses two central questions. The first involves identity: How is writing an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy. Here, like Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark or Jeff Chang's Who We Be, A Stranger's Journey breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and culture. The book's second central question involves structure: How does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative tools that any writer may use, taking in techniques from fiction, screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir and how questions of identity occupy a central place in contemporary memoir.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: How to Read a Novelist John Freeman, 2013-10-08 The novel is alive and well, thank you very much For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the former editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he shares with us what he's learned. From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more, Freeman has talked to everyone. What emerges is an instructive and illuminating, definitive yet still idiosyncratic guide to a diverse and lively literary culture: a vision of the novel as a varied yet vital contemporary form, a portrait of the novelist as a unique and profound figure in our fragmenting global culture, and a book that will be essential reading for every aspiring writer and engaged reader—a perfect companion (or gift!) for anyone who's ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about the person who made it possible.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Pantheologies Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 2018-11-06 Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Birth of a Nation'hood Toni Morrison, 2010-08-25 Co-edited and introduced by Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Birth of a Nation'hood elucidates as never before the grim miasma of the O.J. Simpson case, which has elicited gargantuan fascination. As they pertain to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through twelve powerful essays that have been written especially for this book by distinguished intellectuals--black and white, male and female. Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend our society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair. With contributions by: Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh, Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Ishmael Reed, Leola Johnson and David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Patricia J. Williams, Ann duCille, Armond White, Claudia Brodsky Lacour
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Policing Intimacy Jenna Grace Sciuto, 2021-04-22 In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations. A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Mouth Full of Blood Toni Morrison, 2020 Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Remember Toni Morrison, 2004 The Pulitzer Prize winner presents a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison, 2007-05-08 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Please, Louise Toni Morrison, Slade Morrison, 2014-03-04 On a gray, rainy day, everything seems particularly frightening and bad to Louise until she enters a library and finds books that help her to know and imagine the beauty and wonder that have been there all along.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Toni Morrison and the Bible Shirley A. Stave, 2006 This collection of essays critically interrogates Toni Morrison's use of the Bible in her novels, examining the ways in which the author plays on the original text to raise issues of spirituality as it affects race, gender, and class. Ideal for courses on Morrison or on explorations of the intersection of religion and literature, this collection treats its topic with sophistication, considering «religion» in its broadest possible sense, and examining syncretic theologies as well as mainstream religions in its attempt to locate Morrison's work in a spiritual-theological nexus.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power Toni Morrison, 1992-10-06 It was perhaps the most wretchedly aspersive race and gender scandal of recent times: the dramatic testimony of Anita Hill at the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Yet even as the televised proceedings shocked and galvanized viewers not only in this country but the world over, they cast a long shadow on essential issues that define America. In Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together eighteen provocative essays, all but one written especially for this book, by prominent and distinguished academicians—Black and white, male and female. These writings powerfully elucidate not only the racial and sexual but also the historical, political, cultural, legal, psychological, and linguistic aspects of a signal and revelatory moment in American history. With contributions by: Homi K. Bhabha, Margaret A. Burnham, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Paula Giddings, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Wahneema Lubiano, Manning Marable, Nellie Y. McKay, Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, Gayle Pemberton, Andrew Ross, Christine Stansell, Carol M. Swain, Michael Thelwell, Kendall Thomas, Cornel West, Patricia J. Williams
  toni morrison playing in the dark: The New Latina's Bible Sandra Guzmán, 2011-05-03 For nearly a decade, The Latina's Bible has been the go-to guide for Latinas everywhere. In this updated and expanded edition, author Sandra Guzman continues to use her trademark warmth, humor, and wisdom to explore a wide range of topics, from dating and sexuality to family and career. The New Latina's Bible charts new territory, adding chapters that cover important issues such as sexual abuse, domestic and dating violence, interracial love, and gender identity. Guzman once again provides a hip, empowering, highly readable guide for women who are facing the trials and joys of living and loving as twenty-first century Latinas.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Toni Morrison Box Set Toni Morrison, 2019-10-29 A box set of Toni Morrison's principal works, featuring The Bluest Eye (her first novel), Beloved (Pulitzer Prize winner), and Song of Solomon (National Book Critics Award winner). Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, Beloved transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. This spellbinding novel tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who escapes to Ohio, but eighteen years later is still not free. In The New York Times bestselling novel, The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty and yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes, that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. With Song of Solomon, Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as she follows Milkman Dead from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, introducing an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. This beautifully designed slipcase will make the perfect holiday and perennial gift.
  toni morrison playing in the dark: Notes on Prosody and Abram Gannibal Vladimir Nabokov, 2015-12-08 Two appendixes from Nabokov's famous edition of Eugene Onegin: his study of versification in English and Russian poetry, and his term paper on Pushkin’s Ethiopian ancestor. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The Uncanny objet a in Toni Morrison´s Fiction - Uwasa
a new reading of Toni Morrison’s fiction, this study demystifies the myth of the uncanny and re-finds it in language by way of the objet a. At the centre of Morrison’s fiction is the tension …

An Analysis of - api.pageplace.de
Who is Toni Morrison? Toni Morrison, the author of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), is one of the best-loved, best-selling, and most highly decorated …

assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany ... - JSTOR
Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination challenges the conventional assumptions of literary historians and critics who hold that 'traditional, canonical …

God Help the Child - Lu
Do they remain acid-free?” (Morrison, Playing in the Dark 46). Morrison scrutinizes how in white literature “images of blackness can be […] all the self-contradictory features of the self. …

MARGINALIZATION IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED AND THE …
Toni Morrison writes about the restoration of race and Black marginality in literature. Morrison ... As Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, “what I propose …

Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville - Springer
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark1 The author thanks Jack Turner, Jason Frank, and the anonymous reviewers at Polity for their incisive comments on this piece. 1. Toni Morrison, …

Sula Playing in the Dark Press Release - The Bishop
‘Sula Playing in the Dark’ foregrounds feminine freedom through the fictional protagonist of Toni Morrison’s novel ‘Sula’. In the novel, Sula’s diversion from societal norms, marked by her …

REVEALING SOME INSIGHTS ABOUT THE CONSTRUCTION OF A …
Sènankpon Raoul Ahouangansi REVEALING SOME INSIGHTS ABOUT THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW WHITE AMERICAN IN THE AMERICAN LITERATURE THROUGH ‘PLAYING IN …

Guest Editors' Introduction Toni Morrison: New Directions
Stanley analyzes Morrison's short story from a disability studies perspec tive. Focusing on the neglected figure of Maggie and what she means to other characters, Stanley brings together …

Toni Morrison's Beloved - JSTOR
8 May 2002 · the "dark, abiding, [and] signing" Africanist presence (Morrison, Playing 5). Parallel anxieties in a lattice-work of controls-control of self by self and control by others: this scenario …

Harlem Harlem Renaissance Renaissance poet poet Countee …
Like "Heritage," Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark and Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House both take as their subject notions of 'Af-rica' as an imagistic site around which ideological …

Toni Morrison's Jazz and the Racial Dreams of the American …
America, Toni Morrison winds up reinvigorating one of Ralph Waldo ... dominate that writing affords-a power Playing in the Dark identifies with the American dream of a self-sufficient …

Africanist Presence and Disability Studies - JSTOR
fixed, unfree, and serviceable" (73). In "Recitatif," however, Morrison's white and black figurations are underdetermined, precisely because her racial categories are ambiguous and shifting. …

(Re)Visualizing History in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye - Springer
24 CONFRONTING VISUALITY IN MULTI- ETHNIC WOMEN’S WRITING However, while The Bluest Eye was legible for early readers in the context of the Black Arts movement, which may …

INTRODUCTION: CANONIZING TONI MORRISON - JSTOR
piece on Playing in the Dark in 1992 would open by lauding Morrison for the very quality that Blackburn had condemned her for: "Toni Morrison is both a great novelist and the closest thing …

Re-Membering the Song of My Self African-American Self ... - Sinica
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison (1992b) investigated and challenged what she called “American Africanism.” She explored how an Africanist …

Five Volumes for Toni Morrison - Institute of Contemporary Arts
Toni Morrison - Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation (1984) Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye (1970) Toni Morrison - Sula (1973) Toni Morrison - Jazz …

TONI MORRISON: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY - JSTOR
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cam bridge: Harvard UP, 1992. "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac." Raee-ing Justice, £n-gen ... "Toni Morrison: Solo Flight …

Toni Morrison Recitatif - Chandler Unified School District
Nothing all that important, I mean. Just the big girls dancing and playing the radio. Roberta and me watching. Maggie fell down there once. The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. …

Toni Morrison's Beloved: 'Unspeakable Things Unspoken' Spoken …
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison eradicates the notion of a "traditional, canonical literature . . . free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred …

An investigation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and God Help …
Toni Morrison discusses the American gothic in . Playing in the Dark, and the failure of the American Dream is what grabs her attention – “how pronounced in [the literature] is the …

ENGL 491 (Section 32759D): Senior Seminar in Literary Studies: Toni ...
Toni Morrison: Her Life, Literature, and Legacy Units: 4 Fall 2020; Mondays 2:00-4:20 PM Location: Online Instructor: Dr. Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, ... fiction like Playing in the Dark …

The city and the village in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solommon …
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover. - Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken Song of …

DAZZLING MAGICAL AN EXTRAORDINARY WORK! --New York …
TONI MORRISON HAS BECOME ONE OF AMERICA'S FINEST NOVELISTS." --Cleveland Plain Dealer "THERE IS SOMETHING GREAT IN BELOVED: A ... Playing in the Dark: Whiteness …

Playing In The Dark Toni Morrison - oldshop.whitney.org
An Analysis of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark Karina Jakubowicz,Adam Perchard,2017-07-05 Toni Morrison s Playing in the Dark Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece …

Morrison’s Black Feminist Discourse in A Mercy - ResearchGate
Playing in the Dark , Morrison ela-borated from a historical perspective why African-Americans were marginalized in the United States. To her, ... (Toni Morrison, 2008) [5]. Slavery and …

Racism and Communities Beyond Race: Toni Morrison, Home and …
confront African Americans, Morrison writes, with a “racist house” designed to bar them from home and community (“Home,” 5). Morrison probes the importance of race to the American …

Playing in the Dark and the Quest of Identity : Morrison Painting …
Playing in the Dark and the Quest of Identity: Morrison Paintlng the Hue Colours of Americanness ... Literary lmaglnation, Toni Morrison chose to study the construction of whiteness nom a …

Becoming Minoritarian: Post-Identity in Toni Morrison's 'Jazz'
Post-Identity in Toni Morrison's Jazz Christa Albrecht-Crane "The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up language from its sinister, …

Representation of marginality in Toni Morrison’s narrative
Toni Morrison’s narrative explores the representation of marginalized social groups and shows specific concern with the ... (Playing in the Dark x – xi). Racial and cultural marginalization has …

Toni Morrison's New Bildungsromane - JSTOR
in Playing in the Dark when she embraces sociologist Orlando Patterson's idea: "[W]e should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accom- ... Toni Morrison's New Bildungsromane …

Review Making of the body: Childhood trauma in Toni Morrison’s …
The study probes into the historical and familial inherited trauma of being black in Toni Morrison’s latest novel -God Help the Child. It illustrates how African American children, in Morrison’s …

The Problem of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Toni Morrison, in her non-fiction, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, have argued that what one accepts as ‘Americanness’ today is the result of the four hundred …

Locating 'Paradise' in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and ...
Toni Morrison, Paradise ~T_ his article attempts to "locate" Toni Morrison's Paradise ... (Playing in the Dark 14-15). Her interrogation of literature's foundations suggests that perhaps other …

The Structure of Story in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”
The Structure of Story in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” ... Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagina-tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992.---. “Recitatif.” …

PACING ETHNIC AND GENERIC GAPS IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S …
Watching God(1937) and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination(1992) as far as the main objectives of the two writers are concerned with …

Trading Meanings: The Breath of Music in Toni Morrison's Jazz
The Breath of Music in Toni Morrison's Jazz NICHOLAS F. PICI 'We played music in the house all the time," recalls Toni Morrison in a 1992 inter[ie\ \ith Dana Micucci (275). Indeed, Morrison …

論文 Desire under the Closed Water: Homoeroticism in Toni Morrison’
Homoeroticism in Toni Morrison’s Sula Erika Udono Department of International and Cultural Studies Introduction The critic, Barbara Smith, first pointed out the theme of lesbianism in Toni …

Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark
In 1990 Toni Morrison delivered the William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization. The lecture series was revised and ... In the second chapter of Playing in the Dark, …

The Matter of Whiteness: Or, Why Whiteness Studies Is Important …
In 1992 Toni Morrison brought whiteness studies to the attention of English studies, including rhetoric and composition studies, and to film studies (and vi sual rhetoric), when she published …

“HaveYoutoThisPointAssumedThatIAm White?”: Narrative …
Playing in the Dark Paul Ardoin University of Texas at San Antonio More than twenty-five years after the landmark publication of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the …

Realizations of Black Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
essays called Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imaginationand edited Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of …

Sweetness - moodle.vma.is
By Toni Morrison It’s not my fault. So, you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for …

'Breathing the Air of a World So New': Rewriting the Landscape of ...
' Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1992), 14-15, original emphasis. 8 Ibid., 33-34. 9 Kolodny focusses on male-authored texts to …

The Danger of Sympathy: Edgar Allan Poe's 'Hop-Frog' and the …
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Scott Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution : Transgression in the Development of American Romance (Iowa City: …

Toni Morrison Society Bibliography
"Playing a Mean Guitar: The Legacy of Staggerlee in Baldwin and Morrison." James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays. 121-148. New York, NY: …

Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's Jazz - JSTOR
Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's Jazz oni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodem themes. For example, Sula is structured around the inter- ... her argument in …

Playing in the dark toni morrison Copy | santa.blackpoolzoo.org
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