Silver Gelatin prints are Grey

Photography, a medium of visual representation that since it’s creation in 1839 has changed the way the world has viewed the manufactured image. Olu Oguibe’s essay entitled Photography and the Substance of the Imagery is an article which not only discusses the photographic medium but also it’s role in African cultures and its impact on the perception of those cultures in the west.

       This essay is of great interest because it highlights many of the concepts I have been grappling with throughout this research. While it does not really answer any of those questions, it has once again created another insight into the topic.

According to Oguibe photography arrived in Africa on November 16, 1839. It was the amateur photographer Horace Vernet who brought back the first images of Egypt in 1839. He solidified the presence of the camera and the photograph in Africa for both the European and the African. 

      The specific history of photography is not what is important here, it is the ramifications of the mechanism and the object (which is camera and photography) on African culture which intrigues me. From it’s very early beginning, in the hands of the European the camera was used as an exploitative tool in relation to the African. Nicolas Monti put forth the belief that it was the popular and economically sound trade of photographic images of Africa that were the very beginnings of tourism as a culture. Tourism as an activity is inherently one that must utilize the indigenous population and culture for the gain of the foreign visitor ( that statement is not meant to be viewed as entirely negative, just as using something is not always a negative action.) The concept that tourism culture was created through the use of Africa seems fitting in a relationship that historically saw one side using the other. Within the same realm of thought American photographer F.Holland Day by the turn of the nineteenth century was taking portrait style photographs of alleged ‘Nubian and Ethiopian’ chiefs, using African Americans as models. This saw the beginning of typecasting of Africans in popular culture. Oguibe uses the term ‘junglification’ of the African to describe this phenomenon. It is quite clear that the camera was very rapidly used as another tool by europeans in the ‘otherization’ of the African. 

                                                                             F.Holland Day

       But, those points have been made before, one is aware that the African has been portrayed in a specific  light throughout the history of photography. One does not even have to look that far back into the history of photography to see that. Robert Mapplethrope’s photographic images of black men is a perfect example of the exoticization (or otherization) of the black figure, and many of those were taken as recently as 1985.

Bob Love, 1979.   Title and date unknown,

R. Mapplethorpe R. Mapplethorpe

       

     Oguibe’s essay becomes all the more engaging when he begins his discussion of the photographic image in the hands of Africans. The greatest difference between the use of the photograph in Europe and Africa is the cultural relationship either culture has to an image. The following excerpt from the essay is an excellent example of the western view of photography around the turn of the 19 century:

Much has been made too in the history and criticism of photography about its indexicality or fidelity to reality. On this contemporary theorists of the medium remain as divided as its earliest commentators. For the intellectual and ruling circles of the late Enlightenment Europe, photography proffered a mathematical exactitude of reality, a reducible, a calculable mechanism for the scientific reproduction of nature. In From Painting Is Dead, Tristam Powell quotes the Victorian Lady Eastlake as remarking, “What are nine tenths of these facial maps, called photographic portraits, but accurate landmarks and measurements for loving eyes and memories to deck with beauty and animate with expression, in perfect certainty that the ground plan is founded upon fact.” Though we return to Lady Eastlake’s comment presently, it nevertheless bears within it an element of a certain naive faith in the fidelity of the photograph that would pervade not only the aristocracy in the West but even more so, and with more dangerous insidious consequences, the various institutions of science and the state. Resting on this supposed fidelity and transparency, whole disciplines came to rely upon the evidentiary potentials of the photograph, sociology appealing to it for concrete statistical purposes, anthropology for indubitable evidence of the evolutionary order of the human species, and, in extension, justification for its mission of salvage exploration outside Europe. Jurisprudence and the apparati of state control invented new systems of criminal cartography based on the consciously exaggerated faithfulness of the photographic likeness, and the fundamental right to contest institutional truth was curbed by the supposed unimpeachability of the new tool. (79)

It only seems logical to follow the last excerpt with another one, this time giving a concrete example of an African ideology on the truthfulness of an image:

This understanding fits a broader aesthetic of essence, where the image is “true” as long as efficaciously attends to the specifications of its applications within an intricate matrix of cultural expectations. Whereas our conventional qualification of such circumstances would be that the image is successful- that is to say, that it fulfills its purpose- within the aesthetic success also equates truth. In other words, the image is truthful or accurate if it fulfills its purpose. And is not restricted  to the registration or indeed the excavation of the phenomenological contours of the subject through the iconographic or iconological indexicality: it does indeed extend to the supercession of the phenomenological and the substitution of the nonmimetic. Thus an image, including the photograph, though it may not visually portray or refer to a subject, may yet be applied to the representation of that subject as long as it sufficiently encapsulates the perceived or intended attributes of that subject. (82-3)

It is within these two different ideologies and relationships to images that we can start to see why the photograph has been used so differently in the hands of Europeans and Africans.

Scientific truth and photographs are deeply intertwined with one another in western thought. It is because of this, that people were capable of portraying Africans so ‘earnestly’ even when there was little to no truth in the image made, coupled with many of the concepts examined in prior blog entries. In opposition to that, African thoughts on the photographic image do not remove the human from the action of photographing to the extreme that europeans did. The photograph and camera once introduced into Africa quickly became just another tool for image making. “ In these cultures photography is simply another process of image-making, a process of making rather than taking.” (87) ( a quote referencing the people of Ethiopia’s connection to image making).

       I chose to discuss this particular article as my final official post not because it proposed any kind of grandiose idea or head spinning view. I wanted to discuss this article because I believe it is a summation (as best as I can create) of my exploration to date on the subject of race in visual culture. The photograph not only demonstrates the action of ‘othering’ a group of people perceived as fundamentally different from us. It gives example to how a tool such as the camera can create a power relationship which enables one to have the upper hand over the other. While it is my personal belief that no one group should ever hold absolute power over another because of their differences, this article did more than to cause my morals to flinch. The discussion of the photograph also showed that those difference which are so often wrongly typecast and corner the African are based in truth. This is where I must be careful to make myself very clear, I am not making a value judgement towards or against one cultural identity. I am simply stating that through the discussion of the photograph and of both cultures relationship to that kind of image making we are allowed to see that there are fundamental differences in the way that they are both constructed. We are not the same, yet we are not absolute opposites- there is not a black and white division between cultures. It seems that I once again find myself in some kind of grey area, coming closer to a better understanding of the subject matter but constantly getting further and further away from any understanding at the same time. I suppose the same can be said of this relationship between the Africans and the Americans, it rests in a murky grey area, one which has become all the more complex the more I learn. I am uncertain as where to stop writing, so I am going to stop just as I started somewhere not at the beginning or the end but somewhere in the middle.

Game Face

I wasn’t paying attention at the end of my last blog post. I was led to believe by my own stubborn behavior that I was being tricked into believing many of the pit falls Oguibe describes in his text are only stepped in by those who are ‘othered’ or marked (a term I will discuss momentarily).  Certainly I still believe that many of the examples Oguibe describes in the the first part of his text can also be found in the art world when not in relation to the Other. But after several days of contemplation I’ve come to realize that I can never be placed in the position of the Other, I live unmarked by race in accordance to western ideologies. How then can I determine that these pitfalls aren’t actually different? I cannot ever know if they are the same or different, but I am going to accept that they exist in varying terms and I must acknowledge that.

To be marked in our society is to be of noticeable difference. It is in the most simple of terms (or at least my own simple understanding of the terminology) to be defined by your cultural background first and foremost (or to put it bluntly, your race).  Oguibe begins his second essay of part one entitled Art,Identity,Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art. with a description of an interview between American critic Thomas McEvilley and Ivory painter Ouattara. An interview which quickly slips into an otherization of Ouattara.

      As Oguibe states McEvilley begins the interview with what seems like a rather benign question “When and where were you born?”. After a series of other seemingly equally harmless questions Oguibe’s point is made in this passage:

...that in dealing with the power that McEvilley represents, he is engaged in an ill-matched game of survival, a game that he must play rather carefully if he must avoid profound consequences, a game that he must negotiate with patience to avoid his own erasure, his own annihilation, a game that he must ultimately concede in order to live. (11)

This statement is what initially set me on a path of initial irritation. Because just like McEvilley’s series of questions, that statement taken out of context could readily illustrate the hardships faced by any artist trying to succeed in the art world, regradless of race. However as Oguibe goes on to describe for an artist who has been deemed as Other, it is the day to day reality of the situation. Oguibe explains that these attitudes are a product of colonial ethnography and a colonial desire for a faceless native. This train of thought is in fact the very same one which occurs countless times in Morrison’s articulation of the African character in American literature. I’ve once again run out of words which are stronger than the one’s I’ve read and will once again resort to quoting those I’m reading:

Thus is Ouattara forced, in the interview in question, to iterate and endorse, a bio-narrative of savagery, and thus to wedge his savaged body into the requisite margin between nothingness and subjecthood where he transfigures into the object of his possessor’s desire, into an inter Polaroid picture. (14)

He follows that statement further down the page with a portrait of the so called native, in it’s relationship to western thinking and it’s power of ‘authority’:

The faceless native, displaced from individuality and coalesced into a tribe, a pack, demands and justifies representation because she is a lack. In the event authority is appropriated and transferred from her... Even more specifically, the imposition of anonymity on the native deletes her claims to subjectivity and works to displace her from normativeness. Not only does anonymity conveniently underline her Otherness, her strangeness, her subalternity, anonymity equally magnifies the invented exoticism of her material culture, which in turn becomes a sign of her constructed exoticness. (14)

Oguibe continues this discussion and it’s connection to the contemporary African artist with the use of term borrowed from philosopher Fanon. He goes on to describe the phenomenon of the ‘palatable Negro’. An Other who is easily consumed and removed of all authority, one who personifies anonymity and is available to be penetrated by the West. If that phrase seemed slightly pornographic, it was intentionally so. Oguibe makes the connection between the Other and pornography quite well in this simple excerpt of text:

 

Pornography as a strategy rests on the localization of desire and the intensification of pleasure through the effacement of the subject, the detachment of the locality of desire from the web of subjective associations and reality that impinge on the possessor’s sense of social responsibility. In other words, its principal device is the objectivization of the source of pleasure. (15)

Oguibe finishes this essay with a brief description of how these practices affect the African artist both in their artistic integrity but also in simple economic terms. These concepts remove complexity from African art in the hopes that it can be consumed by the general western public as simplified, pornographic, just for pleasure. When artwork is associated with this kind of language it is priced differently, viewed differently and respected less. Upon re-reading this essay I am know longer so frustrated with the language used by Oguibe to make his point. In fact I am upset that I was so quick to brush off the author’s anger as self-indulgent and a product of his nonacceptance of one’s own actions. I initially believed he was playing the role of the helpless victim, one who does not acknowledge their own part in the game, but simply blames the side for their downfall. How very wrong I was, Oguibe’s anger is not a product of blame, it is a frustration with an entire system which needs to be changed. One where even the act of trying to change it fosters it’s existence. You have my attention Oguibe, I’ll keep listening.

      With respect to Olu Oguibe’s readings I have also included in this post a link to a youtube video entitled Dance with Manbungo, The African Warrior,every girls fantasy. Tease. While I would not say that this particular video rests in the world of either literature or art, it does however make an excellent example for many of the ideologies written about above. I am in by no means placing judgement upon this man. I simply want to view his actions through this specific lens. Are his actions products of a society where he is Othered? By playing the lowest common denominator in African stereotypes (the savage) is he catering to a white audiences desire to ingest such simplified perceptions of Africans? I’ve no answer to these questions yet and I do not know enough about this man to determine whether or not his performance is satirical. It is clearly meant to be humorous, but is this video a product of the same game Oguibe describes being played between McEvilley and Ouattara, a need to Other oneself in order to gain acceptance (willingly or not)?

Manbungo,The African Warrior,Every girls fantasy. Tease

Pitfalls and narrow passages

The construction of an image is not always done by the constructor. Olu Oguibe’s The Culture Game is a collection of essays focusing on the way in which Western cultures and postcolonial African cultures have affected one another in our modern and postmodern eras. In part one of the book entitled Terrain of Difficulty, Oguibe begins to outline the ever present pressure the west places upon African artists to play the role of the other. Divided into four shorter essays part one is a collection which is filled with both frustration and the potential for a lack of accepting one’s own responsibility as an individual. Within this section of Oguibe’s book he brings to the readers attention the pigeon holing nature of the art world (and of Western thought in general) , in it’s treatment of non-western artists, specifically those of African heritage.

    The first essay entitled In “ The Heart of Darkness”  is an introduction to seven key area’s of discourse which Oguibe returns to again and again in the proceeding pages. I will briefly paraphrase each point so as to more easily discuss the three essays which follow it. His first point of interest is the Occidental nature of history. He states that  the west has taken the reigns of history and in doing so dictates what is or is not deemed to be history. A history which generally leaves the non-western societies as void of history and therefore inconsequential. Point two in this essay is a continuation of the first point. It is a brief discussion which I believe is more easily described by utilizing Oguibe’s own words:

It is in this context that any meaningful discussion of modernity and “modernism” in African must be conducted, not in relation to the idea of an existing center or a Modernism against which we must all read our bearings, but in recognition of the multiplicity and culture specificity of modernisms and plurality of centers. (4)

This comment is in relation to the West’s power of history and the overwhelming needs for scholars and other people to immediately make comparisons to the west when discussing the histories of other countries, therefore reasserting the concept of otherness (key to Oguibe).  

     The third point makes use of the west’s action of creating all encompassing narratives for the whole of Africa, Blanketing it as one entity which has one united history. This thought is paired with the notion that it is a concept which needs to exist in the western mind because it is the entire structure on which Africa has been created. Without it an entire system of discourse and agenda’s would collapse.

     Fourthly, Oguibe enables a discussion about the study of ‘contemporary African art’ and it’s relationship to the particular region of Sub-Saharan Africa. This division he states is an attempt (an unsuccessful one) at ensuring that the Africa discussed is unified, by removing the Northern region and it’s close relationship to Arab culture, scholars can ‘ensure’ that the Africa they are speaking of is entirely ‘African’.  Fifth on his list is the discussion of when modern or contemporary African art began to occur. He states that is many scholars beliefs it was not until the turn of the last century. Oguibe brings up the argument that African citizens of European countries had from a much earlier date been practicing ‘modern’ art, as well as other societies and cultures found within Egypt and Maghreb (which according to some are not entirely African as they are above the Sahara.)

     The sixth point made in the essay is a discussion of double standards found in the rhetoric of history in relation to art in Europe and Africa. Terminology in reference to specific historical periods is different, certain actions are praised in one area and frowned upon in the other. The most poignant example would be the of European appropriation of different cultural elements in it’s arts during the period of modernity. This was deemed as a great advance in western culture. While the same utilization of other culture references in Africa is seen as a contamination of ‘pure’ culture and greatly discouraged by the west. 

 

     Finally, we are left with a summation of the points given above. I will leave you with a quote from Oguibe’s seventh point before I venture into the other three essays:

Otherization is unavoidable, and for every One, the Other is the Heart of Darkness. The West is as much the Heart of Darkness to the Rest as the latter is to the West. Invention and contemplation of the Other is a continuous process evident in all cultures and societies. But in contemplating the Other, it is necessary to exhibit modesty and admit relative handicap since the peripheral location of the contemplator precludes complete understanding. This opacity is the Darkness. (8-9)

I am in no way in contestation of the very apparent existence of the Other. However in the following entry I would like to closely examine the relationships and examples Oguibe has employed, as it is currently my belief that while they certainly exist between racial and cultural boundaries he is neglecting to acknowledge that many of the examples he uses in his essays can readily be found without any trace of the Other occurring.

Object?

       Here I have posted Charles Burnett's 1973 short film entitled The Horse. I believe it has a strong relationship to Morrison's discussion of the black figure in American literature being used solely as a symbol and not humanizing the characters to the fullest extent. I will elaborate on this comment further in the upcoming days.

click the link below to watch the full video.


http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/10/charles_burnett.html

Co-dependency?

Black and white, white or black. However you position those two words in relation to one another there is no way around an immediate comparison of their differences. They are in fact polar opposites of each other. No one argues that, but what is often less discussed is how one would function without the other. This is where Morrison’s second essay in Playing in the Dark has led me. Romancing in the Shadow is yet again a critical look at how the role of the African has been portrayed in the literature of new America. I refer to new America loosely as the period of time when America was a relatively young country, painfully trying to assert it’s differentness from it’s European heritage. This essay has several important factors which I would like to discuss here;  the concept of the other, and the codependency a white America has on blackness in respect to it’s national identity.

Morrison begins her discussion by examining the creation of America as a nation  attempting to be independent of it’s roots, one which is trying in earnest to not behave as it’s European counterpart. Morrison goes on to explain the ideology which was behind many of the immigrants who came to this new land. The ideas of freedom and possibility in contrast to the oppression and limitations which many of the immigrants faced if they were to have stayed in their country of origin. It was of fresh starts, freedom, and clean slates which early Americans dreamed of, these beliefs created what we now know as the “the American dream”. It is this freedom of creating a new persona for oneself which is at arms with the entirely dominated slave population which enabled new American to be built. We will return to this thought briefly. First, I would like to include an excerpt from Morrison’s article in which she discusses new American author’s usage of romance. 

Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow a-historical canvas but a wide historical one; not escape but entanglement. For young America it had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics  of the search for self-valorization and validation-above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror- and terror’s most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all the connotative value it awakened. (37)

Within this description and use of romance in new America’s writers we find once again the employment of America’s black population as a tool to look at culture and society. Morrison takes a term from Herman Melville when she states that there is no romance free of “ the power of blackness”.  She discusses the slave population of America in terms which enable it to become a microcosm which could be analyzed as a surrogate self. Here once again I find her words stronger than my own to articulate this concept:

The slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness. This black population was available for meditations on terror- the terror of European outcasts, their dread of failure, powerlessness, Nature without limits, natal loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed. In other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man. (37-8)

It is from this brief description of the slave population being used as a substitute for the new white population of America that one can enter into the discussion of the other, which in this essay is the keystone concept. In her discussion of the slave as a literary tool, she articulates her thoughts using the term “ the not-me”. Due to the slave populations lack of freedom and their noted difference in skin color they were capable of being used as a projection which the white population could place any number of ideas or concerns upon. It is the constant fear white Americans had of failure, lack of freedom and security that led them to need the black population in their creation of a national selfhood. Power and any of the other key thoughts associated with a new country cannot easily be discussed without a counterpart. The African population of America acted as an “ego-reinforcing presence...” (45).  Morrison’s thoughts on the other are heavily intertwined with her relationship to literature. It seems difficult at times to understand that these abstractions are not beliefs held simply in literature but that the literature of the time was actually a reflection of the populations opinions. This creation of the other is significantly noticeable when you begin to realize that even the word American connotes white. To be American is to be white, something that Morrison points out in our languages usage of the hyphen when describing African-Americans or any other notable non white population living in America.  To understand this better I want to return to Morrison’s employment of literature. In her opinion it was not expressedly the slave which enabled the American to see them as the other, it was also directly influenced by their skin color a skin color loaded with historical relationships. Morrison states: 

It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color “meant” something. That meaning had been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars started to investigate both the natural history and the inalienable rights of man- that is to say, human freedom... the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. The point for this discussion is the alliance between visually rendered ideas and the linguistic utterances.(49)

The color of the slaves skin being so different from their white dominators enabled the whites to create a meaning for why it existed. White is light, black is dark. White is pure and clear, black is dangerous and hard to see. The American psyche set up a stark contrast of what these two colors represented. A representation that they placed upon the darker skinned black population. Morrison finishes her essay with a discussion of several areas where further research needs to be undertaken to fully understand the complexities of the black figure in American literature. She poses the questions of how the Africanist characters purpose as a surrogate or enabler works. Secondly a discussion needs to be had about how “...an Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or, in a later period, to signal modernity.” (52). Finally she argues that an investigation into how the Africanist character enforces and supports the invention and suggestions of whiteness. A subject we have yet to really discuss other than how it is affected by blackness. Morrison closes the article with a brief description of the relationship shown between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. A discussion that is based in the concepts discussed above. From Morrison’s words it is clear to see how an American identity and one that is solely white was and still is completely reliant on the image of the other, of the Africanist or black character. It is a relationship which does not enable the black character to be fully realized as it is used for a purpose to validate whitness. Before I finish I would like to leave you with one last passage from Morrison as it has stimulated me to begin to research from the other side; 

In that sense the book may indeed be “great” because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates an describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.(57) (Italics are my own, and the book she is referring to in this passage is Huckleberry Finn.)

I must start to look at how whiteness solidifies blackness, because certainly while this may be a bumpy road it certainly cannot be a one way street. 

One must start somewhere.

One must start somewhere, even when that somewhere does not seem like the exact place a journey is meant to begin.  I am uncertain if I am starting this research in the middle, or the end, but I am certainly not starting at it’s beginning. I could have started this blog with a post about culture, how it is created, maintained, and exactly what culture is. I would have been stuck there for weeks treading water, never getting anywhere near coherent answers to questions that large.  It is specifically for that reason I have decided to begin somewhere in between the middle and the end of all of this. Somewhere I can ground myself in the hopes that it will enable me to eventually see both the start and the end of whatever it is I am trying to find.  

    Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark is the author’s response to several questions  that were raised in three William E. Massey lectures given at Harvard University as well as a course taught by the author on American literature on the same subject matter. While I have no desire to endeavor into a subject matter as specific as American literature and it’s relationship to African and African-American characters (as well as it’s readers) Morrison, as you will see enables me to start a discussion about how culture reacts to the idea of blackness. She is speaking precisely about American literature but the ideas which arise reach much further than the written page. In this blog entry I will give a brief overview of the first essay by Morrison entitled Black Matters.

 

     Morrison begins her essay with the discussion of what she believes to be a generalized truth in the literary world. She claims that the history of American literature sees itself as “... free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans, and then African-Americans in the United states.” (4-5) She goes on to state that this presence which shaped every other aspect of the American landscape somehow has not affected American literature. She of course does not in the slightest believe this to be true. She then goes on to begin a discussion based around the phrase “American Africanism” which she has invented to categorize the “...denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify...” (6). It is here that the reader obtains and initial sense of what Morrison is driving towards in this essay. Her beliefs that African characters in American literature have been viewed as symbols and literary devices rather than actual characters. It is in this vain that American literature has not had to confront notions of race head on. Morrison explains that this phenomenon can easily be viewed in literature’s “silence and evasion” tactics of dealing with race.  This sort of ignorance of race in literature has become widely accepted by many as a graceful way of not bringing race to the forefront. Clearly, it is someone who is uncomfortable with race that openly discusses it? We live in a raceless world do we not?  Morrison closes this section of the essay with several passages which I would like to leave here: 

I assumed that because the author was not black, the appearance of Africanist characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the “normal” unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was written for black people- no more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of Africanist person is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this... Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence. (16-17)

      She goes on to establish and prove many of her earlier points in the article with the example of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (published 1940). Morrison discusses the novels plot and characters in a manner that discusses the relationship between white mistress and black female slave. She recognizes the relationship is one where the central white female character constructs an identity through the actions she imposes upon her black subjects. I do not find it at this point relevant to give a greater synopsis of Cather’s novel as I have not read it myself. Morrison uses it solely as as term to discuss her earlier ideas of blackness being used as sort of mirror on which white authors have imposed their own thoughts and biographies.

     I will leave you this question I posed earlier in the post as I need some time to ruminate on it myself before I can write a satisfactory answer. If it is true that we live in a “raceless society” , is it only people who are uncomfortable with issues of race who draw attention to them?

I will return when my thoughts on this matter are clearer.