Playing in the Dark

History

In 1990, Morrison delivered a series of three lectures at the Massey Lectures at Harvard University; she then adapted the texts to a 91-page book, Playing in the Dark, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press.

Subject matter

Writing in Signs, Linda Krumholz described Morrison's project as "reread[ing] the American literary canon through an analysis of whiteness to propose the ways that black people were used to establish American identity."

Reviewing Playing in the Dark in The New York Times in 1992, Wendy Steiner said: "The moral and emotional force of [Morrison's] explorations is apparent. If the American identity is formed against this black shadow, it is a sign of abject weakness and a cause for shame....The genius of Ms. Morrison's approach is to enlist those very describers and imaginers--white men of letters---in an investigation that can end only in their self-indictment." But, Steiner added, "it is also not a mere denunciation of white culture. Instead, it is a self-help project meant both to map out new critical territory and to rearrange the territory within."

Michael Eric Dyson observes that in addition to this exploration of the "white literary imagination...Playing in the Dark is also about a black intellectual seizing the interpretive space within a racially ordered hierarchy of cultural criticism. Blacks are usually represented through the lens of white perception rather than the other way around...With [Playing in the Dark], a substantial change is portended."

Reception

In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, making her one of the most-assigned of all female writers.