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.
Of course, we DON'T live in a "raceless society," nor, as has been so often claimed since the election of Barack Obama do we live in a "post-racial" society. If we did, he wouldn't face six times the number of death threats previous presidents have--most of these framed and uttered from within the racialized fantasies of their utterers.
ReplyDeleteSo what does Morrison mean? She thinks about this fact: that white American writers rarely attribute subjectivity (full personhood, emotional richness, thoughtfulness) to non-white--and particularly black--characters. Instead, they use blackness, fear of blackness, a relation to black characters to develop a full WHITE subjectivity, an unspoken but clear consciousness of personhood as whiteness. In American letters this doesn't happen without recourse to fantasies about blackness, many of them disavowed. Morrison would seem to argue (and I would largely agree) that (white) people uncomfortable speaking about race (they don't see themselves as "raced") prefer not to address race except as an attribute that belongs to others of various sorts.
See if you can back up a bit. Look, on page 9, where Morrison argues (in 1992) "that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled [mainstream or white American critical] literary discourse."
If blackness (an "Africanist presence" are the words Morrison uses), often silently shapes white American subjectivity, what forces have and do actively shape African American accounts of history, writing, artwork and subjectivities, black, white and other? WEB DuBois claimed in 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk, that "double-consciousness" was the lot of a black person in a racist white world. Are these useful optics in your thinking about culture--to see unconsciousness about race (nevertheless fully shaped by it) in mainstream (white) productions, and double-consciousness (or more) in black cultural elaborations? What do you think?