Summary
American writer and critic whose Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is Said’s finest example of the integrative impulse that reinstates excluded historical experience into literary discussion (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.17).
Details
- Morrison’s book is moved not by anger but by delight, and by what she knows “about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language” (4, quoted PDF p.17).
- In American literature, in her account as Said quotes it, there was frequent effort to talk about the presence of Africans “with a vocabulary designed to disguise the subject”, producing a master narrative that spoke for Africans and their descendants, with which a response from the Africanist persona could not coexist (50, quoted PDF p.17).
- Her images of punishing whiteness, in Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym and Melville’s Moby Dick, “seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing” (33, quoted PDF p.17).
- Said’s judgment: for Morrison the exclusion is ultimately unsuccessful, and it is the critic’s role to re-include, re-inscribe and re-define it, without attacking literature as literature and without appeal to a folk or nativist alternative (PDF p.17).
Related pages
Edward Said, Historical experience, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays