I know that sequential posts by one poster are usually regarded as bad form, but on rereading my above post, I decided that I should not attempt to speak for those Others but should provide some of their own words, an extensive act beyond a simple edit. I also just now found my copy of Morrison's book.
Here is an excerpt from the preface to Toni Morrison's work,
Playing in the Dark:
Quote:
The principle reason these matters loom large for me is that I do not have quite the same access to these traditionally useful constructs of blackness. Neither blackness nor "people of colour" stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. [Here she is alluding to her discussion of a passage from Marie Cardinal's The Words to Say It, about a white French girl's thoughts on growing up in colonial Algeria.] I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'othering' of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; villifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains. (The only short story I have ever written, "Recitatif," was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.)
. . . .
When does racial "unconsciousness" or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly [or readerly, as she has suggested previously] self, in the wholly racialised society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly[again, also, readerly] imagination of a black author [again, reader] who is at some level always conscious of representing one's own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be "universal" or race-free? In other words, how is "literary whiteness" and "literary blackness" made, and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be "humanist'?
|
EDIT: cross-posted with
HI, so I guess my apologia here wasn't necessary.
I think Morrison answers some of the points
HI has raised in his post: the point is not that it cannot be done, but what goes on to make it 'done'?