toni morrison black matters essay pdf

Black Matters Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is a Nobel Laureate who has written acclaimed novels, short stories, children’s books, and many other works. Toni Morrison wrote “Black Matters” in 1979. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18th 1931. Toni Morrison went to Howard University for two years before pursuing an English degree at Cornell University. Toni Morrison later went on to receive a master’s degree in English from Cornell University.

Toni Morrison was married for one year before getting divorced, Toni Morrison had two sons with her first husband whom she also got divorced from. Toni Morrison never remarried but took on both of her ex-husbands surnames as her own. Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize twice for her novels “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon”. Toni Morrison has written many other award winning books such as “Sula”, “Jazz”, Sigrid Undset Prize, The Arthur C Clarke Award, Nobel Prize, etcetera.

Toni Morrison is currently retired after the release of her last novel in 2012. Toni Morrison still lives in New York City and is a Professor Emerita at Princeton University. Toni Morrison has also been a visiting professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Brandeis. Toni Morrison said that she owes much to the work of Black Arts Movement pioneers such as Larry Neal who died in 1975. Toni Morrison was born Toni Morris but decided to shorten her name because it “was too long for people” (Morrison).

Toni Morrison wrote an essay titled “Black Matters”[1] where she talks about black life during that time period from the perspective from the black community rather than a white person’s perspective. Toni Morrison starts off by talking about how during this time, 1979, in the African-American community there is a need to know black history. Toni Morrison talks about how when she was in school they didn’t teach her or any colored person about what happened in their own history in America.

Toni Morrison feels that up until this point in time blacks were never seen as individuals and Toni Morrison wants society to see them as “individuals who have been denied opportunities” Toni Morrison’s essay brings up an interesting point which was brought up by many of Toni Morrisons works such as Song of Solomon where Toni Morrison implies that the only way for the people to move forward from slavery is for them to be able to see themselves through their heritage and not look at themselves through the eyes of the dominant society.

Toni Morrison feels that blacks will only be able to move forward when they are allowed to know their own history which Toni Morrison states is told by white people who Toni Morrison questions would not tell it accurately (Morrison). Toni Morrison feels that this is one of the ways in which Black identity can be formed in America and Toni Morrison uses historical figures such as Toussaint L’ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln etcetera to bring up her point (Morrison).

Toni Morrisons essay seems very plausible because any person who wants to learn about something must first know what they want to find out or else there would be no point in researching anything. Toni Morrison does a good job by talking about black history from the perspective of blacks because Toni Morrison’s way of writing is from her own personal experience being a black person during this time period and Toni Morrison simply wants to make a point that Toni Morrison feels it is important for blacks to know their roots and Toni Morrison even says “knowledge is power” (Morrison).

Toni Morrison has written many other works on race relations such as Playing in the Dark where Toni Morrison talks about how African-American literature was influenced by white people or The Bluest Eye which deals with colorism among blacks. Toni Morrisons essay shows great insight into some problems that were going on at the time which were related to not having black history taught at school and Toni Morrison wants to help blacks come together as a community by teaching them about their heritage.

Toni Morrison’s essay has helped me see that Toni Morrison feels that history is not always written down in the right way because Toni Morrison feels that Toussaint L’ouverture and Frederick Douglass and other important figures were not properly praised for their actions and Toni Morrison even uses Abraham Lincoln as an example of how the whites try to make him look like the hero when he freed all slaves which Toni Morrison says was really done through Toussaint L’ouverture (Morrison).

Morrison claims that black knowledge is not viewed as real knowledge by society. Toni Morrison believes that traditional literature does not include African American “knowledge,” or morals in a way which can be communicated to other races and cultures. Toni Morrison goes so far as to say that it looks like traditional literature contains no tangible meaning for anybody but white males. Toni Morrison also addresses the representation of blacks in history books, where she says it is easy to find references to slaves who run away from their masters, but difficult to find information on abolitionists (Morrison 312).

Toni Morrison then criticizes the idea that stories written about whites have universal meaning while stories written about blacks have only regional significance. Toni Morrison also questions the representation of African Americans in music by saying that “at present there is little or no black music taught in schools, included in anthologies, performed by our professionals” (Morrison 313). Toni Morrison asks why it seems like blacks are not allowed to know what they own.

Toni Morrison addresses traditional literature as being Eurocentric, and claims that European culture is the only culture which has been studied enough so as to be thought of as knowledge. Toni Morrison says that if people went back far enough into their own history they would find out that Europe was full of dark-skinned people but decided to call themselves white because whiteness gave them power.

Toni Morrison also questions how many Westerners have had contact with Africans outside of slavery, Toni Morrison says that contact is rare because Westerners are taught to think of Africans as victims, Toni Morrison states that the same victims who were being victimized by European slavers. Toni Morrison says that if a person does have contact with an African they may only see a refugee not knowing that the person is “a member of a people who have been inhabitants and cultivators of a continent for five thousand years” (Morrison 314).

Toni Morrison asks how Europeans can claim knowledge when they don’t even know what they have done. Toni Morrison says, “In order to understand where we are now, we must try to understand where we’ve been” (315) Toni Morrison echoes Tocqueville’s sentiment from Democracy in America, Toni Morrison says that African Americans are trying to define themselves not by their past but “in spite of their past” (315). Toni Morrison also states the dilemma of blacks who feel they must choose between identifying with Africa and identifying with Western civilization.

Toni Morrison presents one solution to this struggle: black nationalism. Toni Morrison claims that black nationalism will allow all races to communicate and understand each other because it uses knowledge as a foundation for communication among people. Toni Morrison’s purpose for writing “Black Matters” is to show how institutionalized racism has forced blacks into isolation, Toni Morisson wants people to understand that Black matters even though society does not treat them as such.

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Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark" (2007): Overview

Note: This overview started as teaching notes, which I created for a class called "Theories of Literature and Social Justice." An earlier version of this essay can be found here . --Amardeep Singh, April 2021 Toni Morrison was a groundbreaking figure in multiple fields -- as a novelist of course, as an editor who made it to the top of New York publishing, and also as a literary critic! Alongside all of her other work, Toni Morrison’s literary critical essays have also been hugely influential, and continue to be widely cited by scholars of American literature for their insights and arguments. 

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) has been extremely helpful for scholars interested in thinking about race in American literature, especially American literature by non-black authors. It’s helped to engender an entirely new sub-field that didn’t exist when she wrote it, what we now call “whiteness studies.” Quantitatively, Google scholar indicates a minimum of 9400 citations for this book, which puts it in the top tier of literary critical scholarship, up there with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) as epochal, paradigm-shifting works. 

 The argument is actually fairly simple. Here it is in my own words: Morrison argues that the figure of Blackness in "mainstream" American literature plays a decisive role in shaping American culture, as described and documented in literary narrative. If what we understand as distinctively American culture is partly about the the invention of a new, individualized man -- the autonomous figure in Emerson and Thoreau’s writings -- Morrison wants us to remember that that new man is specifically a white man, defining himself in opposition to non-white others. In her various readings, Morrison sees Blackness manifested first in the presence of individual Black characters, some of whom might seem marginal on first glance, but also in a more generalized "Africanism" that points to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the institutionalized racism that accompanied it and followed it.  To put it quite simply, the idealized image of American individualism is an image of whiteness that has been built on the exclusion of blackness .  

For many American literary critics, this was a controversial claim when Morrison made it, in 1992. There has been a powerful resistance to emphasizing the centrality of race or racism in American literary criticism. Earlier generations of literary critics tended to suggest that despite the obvious importance of slavery in American history, the major figures in canonical American literature -- figures like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Wharton, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather -- seemed to have fairly little interest in race, and rarely mentioned it. Moreover, despite the acknowledged existence of Black people, indigenous Americans, and immigrants, the narratives composed by writers like Poe and Melville have been understood by mainstream literary critics as essentially "raceless" and "universal." Morrison wants to rebut both of these claims, first by pointing us to a sampling of passages and moments in the works of canonical white authors where race turns out to be very important. And second, the idea that these representations exist outside of race is a power move by the literary establishment for its own ends, by no means something we have to accept as simply and categorically “true.” 

For Morrison, and for the generations of critics who have worked on these questions since this book was published, white Americanness is not simply a universal. Whiteness is something that can and should be be named and studied. (This admittedly makes some people uncomfortable. But remember: when we talk about whiteness, we are not talking about white individuals, we’re talking about whiteness as an analytical category .) Second, whiteness is always, always relational -- which is to say, it is defined in relation to non-white others. This emphasis on relationality isn’t likely to be a huge surprise to many people of color; they’ve always understood their identities to be defined in relation to a mainstream American identity that is always presumed to be white. 

 ------------------

 Let’s get deeper into the book itself. 

 First off, Morrison mentions jazz at the very beginning of the book, with reference to a passage in Marie Cardinal’s novel The Words to Say It . There, the music of Louis Armstrong precipitates a psychic crisis in the narrator: “Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed.” Toni Morrison goes on to provide a series of remarkably compelling readings of as she puts it, “the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.”

What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature--even the cause--of literary ‘whiteness.’ (Morrison, 9)

The kind of reading method Morrison employs in her book is what some critics would call dialectical reading (Edward Said would describe it, using musical terminology as “contrapuntal.”) She sees Whiteness and Blackness as intertwined, as producing each other, in American life . Whiteness is a dominant, but it depends upon its subordinate to give it shape, even though it also aims to relegate its other to a position of marginality and partial erasure. Sometimes the marginalization is direct and obvious (as she shows happening in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not : the Black character on the boat to whom Hemingway refuses to grant agency). At other times, the connection is more associative -- requiring the critic to fill in gaps left by authors whose failure to grant full subjectivity to their Black characters is symptomatic (a great example of this more associative reading method might be with Morrison’s account of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl ).

 Later in the Preface, she writes: 

The principal 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 color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. 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; vilifying 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. (Preface, x-xi)  

Here, Morrison is writing herself into the story. She sees the ways white writers use blackness as tending towards “metaphorical shortcuts” rather than substantive engagements, as in effect providing a useful set of tropes for those writers rather than a serious point of exploration. I’m also interested in the point where she acknowledges that the danger for a Black writer might lie in “romanticizing Blackness”; here I think she must be referring to what in the 1970s and 80s was called Afrocentric or Black nationalist thinking, and she’s clearly distancing herself from that approach as well. Finally, it’s telling that she always brings it back to language, and she maintains what seems like considerable humility in her engagements on that front. 

A final passage from the Preface we might want to consider: 

For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author 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? [...] Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. (Preface, xii-xiii)  

Here, Morrison aims to put forward the centrality of race as a topic, and suggest that all of us are implicated in it -- that the construction of an “unraced” reader is a deliberate act. That unraced subject was in fact, she states, “presumed to be white.” Morrison is asking what the consequences might be of, as it were, erasing race, but she is also clearly gesturing towards how we might reinsert it. It might be a little uncomfortable at first to say that Melville and Emerson were white American writers interested in whiteness  (and sometimes Blackness), but it is more honest and also potentially more inclusive to do so.  

Another key foundational passage from section 1, “Black matters”:  

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumption conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as ‘knowledge.’ This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four hundred-year-old presence of, first Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence--which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture--has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular ‘Americanness’ that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. [...] The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination. ( 4-5)  

This passage does two things that seem important to underline. First is the way Morrison is frontally challenging a way of thinking that had been accepted as uncontroversially true -- a mode of “factual” knowledge about American literature rather than a constructed argument. What she’s saying in this book would require some people to realize that a good deal of what they had previously thought and said about American authors and American national culture was much more open to challenge than they had probably expected. Second, she’s helping to introduce the idea of the “Africanist presence"  she will be referring to throughout the book. She’s clearly interested in the Africanist presence as being both African (especially in the early literature, when many enslaved Black people were either recently brought over from Africa or recently descended from Africans) and eventually in its emergence as African American . 

She continues to unpack “American Africanism” on pages 6 and 7. Here is a bit more on the “Africanism” mentioned above: 

 I am using the term ‘ Africanism ’ not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentin Mudimbe means by the term ‘Africanism,’ nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. (6-7)

It’s safe to say that in many cases, when Morrison uses the term ‘Africanism’ she means it as synonymous with ‘Black’. I do think she’s interested in the ways there are residual echoes and reverberations of African culture and expressive language that have remained with Black folks in the U.S. long after knowledge of African languages disappeared. Some of her novels show us this -- it’s in the connection of ancestor Solomon to Africa in Song of Solomon , or Sethe’s mother and ‘Nan’ in Beloved , who are shown speaking another language at the beginning of the novel -- it seems like they’ve been recently transported to the U.S. (See our overviews of these novels here .) 

 Another important passage: the subject of the dream is the dreamer:

How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work? As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing “happens”: Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative—displays of the agile writer’s technical expertise. I assumed that since 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 ever 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 an Africanist persona 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. (16-17)

This is a huge breakthrough. In my words: when white writers write about Black people as marginal characters, Morrison isn’t necessarily asking us to invert the paradigm and see those characters as somehow central or definitive (though sometimes they might be). Rather, the construction of racialized others in texts by white writers tells us something about the construction of whiteness in those texts: "the subject of the dream is the dreamer." 

I might also note that Morrison’s move here is remarkably parallel to what Edward Said notes in Orientalism with respect to western conceptions of non-western cultures. When American writers construct a discourse of Africanism in their works, they are constructing an inverted mirror -- a fantasy of otherness. They are not, by and large, actually incorporating the actual voices and narratives of people of African descent. When British writers like H. Rider Haggard or Joseph Conrad dreamed of “savages” in sub-Saharan Africa, they were not seeing and hearing real African people; they were imagining an Other to themselves said more about their fantasies than it did to the ethnographic reality of the people they were ostensibly encountering along the Nile or the Congo. (See our introduction to key concepts in Orientalism   here .)

 -------------------

The next section of “Black Matters” deals with Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl , which as Morrison acknowledges is not a novel of Cather’s people tend to talk about much. Why and how does it fail? What is it about the story that’s unsatisfying? 

For Morrison, some of it at least is the way Cather can’t come up with a realistic imagining of either of the major Black characters in the story, Nancy (the daughter) or Til (the mother). She’s particularly blank on Til, whose maternal concern for her daughter who has disappeared is reduced to a single opportunity to ask a question about whether her daughter has made it safely to Canada. Morrison encapsulates her frustration with Cather’s failure of imagination in the following paragraphs:   

 Rendered voiceless, a cipher, a perfect victim, Nancy runs the risk of losing the reader’s interest. In a curious way, Sapphira’s plotting, like Cather’s plot, is without reference to the characters and exists solely for the ego-gratification of the slave mistress. This becomes obvious when we consider what would have been the consequences of a successful rape. Given the novel’s own terms, there can be no grounds for Sapphira’s thinking that Nancy can be “ruined” in the conventional sense. There is no question of marriage to Martin, to Colbert, to anybody. Then, too, why would such an assault move her slave girl outside her husband’s interest? The probability is that it would secure it. If Mr. Colbert is tempted by Nancy the chaste, is there anything in slavocracy to make him disdain Nancy the unchaste? Such a breakdown in the logic and machinery of plot construction implies the powerful impact race has on narrative—and on narrative strategy. Nancy is not only the victim of Sapphira’s evil, whimsical scheming. She becomes the unconsulted, appropriated ground of Cather’s inquiry into what is of paramount importance to the author: the reckless, unabated power of a white woman gathering identity unto herself from the wholly available and serviceable lives of Africanist others. This seems to me to provide the coordinates of an immensely important moral debate. (24-25)  

The key parts for me are in bold above. I do think Morrison is seeing a slippage between the contrivances of Sapphira in the novel and the contrivances of the author: both are white women “gathering identity unto [themselves] from the wholly available and serviceable lives of Africanist others.” 

Section 2: “Romancing the Shadow” 

This section starts with an account of an Edgar Allen Poe story , The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , where the death of an African in a stranded boat leads to the apparition of a giant white ghost. The particularities of the reading of this particular story might not be essential for us to grasp: Morrison quickly pivots to an account of early American literature more generally: 

Young America distinguished itself by, and understood itself to be, pressing toward a future of freedom, a kind of human dignity believed unprecedented in the world. A whole tradition of “universal” yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled phrase, “the American Dream.” Although this immigrant dream deserves the exhaustive scrutiny it has received in the scholarly disciplines and the arts, it is just as important to know what these people were rushing from as it is to know what they were hastening to. If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one? The flight from the Old World to the New is generally seen to be a flight from oppression and limitation to freedom and possibility. Although, in fact, the escape was sometimes an escape from license—from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined—for those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones, constraint and limitation impelled the journey. All the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty, prison, social ostracism, and, not infrequently, death. There was of course a clerical, scholarly group of immigrants who came seeking the adventure possible in founding a colony for, rather than against, one or another mother country or fatherland. And of course there were the merchants, who came for the cash.   Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the “clean slate” variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again but to be born again in new clothes, as it were. The new setting would provide new raiments of self. This second chance could even benefit from the mistakes of the first. In the New World there was the vision of a limitless future, made more gleaming by the constraint, dissatisfaction, and turmoil left behind. It was a promise genuinely promising. With luck and endurance one could discover freedom; find a way to make God’s law manifest; or end up rich as a prince. The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God’s law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt. (33-35)  

There’s nothing here that’s very controversial -- these are claims that would be widely accepted as an uncontroversial account of the emergence of the “American mind” -- one of the key facets of American culture. Rugged individualism, egalitarianism, room for free thought and an unconventional orientation to society (i.e., the American tradition of freethinking non-conformism). 

The example she gives of this in the subsequent pages, the story of William Dunbar as recounted in a book called Voyagers to the West , which turns out to be pretty jaw-dropping. Dunbar came from Scotland, immigrated to the early U.S., and maintained a plantation in Mississippi with a number of Black Caribbean slaves. When those slaves rebelled against his authority, he had them beaten -- brutally (four sets of 500 lashes). He was also known as an extremely learned man with thoughts on the new American democratic experiment, a member of the Philosophical society, well-respected by people like Thomas Jefferson . 

 For Morrison, there is no contradiction here: this is it. Here is her take on how this image of Dunbar seems to perfectly encapsulate the contradiction at the heart of the construction of (white) Americanness: 

I take this to be a succinct portrait of the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted. It is a formation with at =least four desirable consequences, all of which are referred to in Bailyn’s summation of Dunbar’s character and located in how Dunbar felt “within himself.” Let me repeat: “a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage world.” A power, a sense of freedom, he had not known before. But what had he known before? Fine education, London sophistication, theological and scientific thought. None of these, one gathers, could provide him with the authority and autonomy that Mississippi planter life did. Also this sense is understood to be a force that flows, already present and ready to spill as a result of his “absolute control over the lives of others.” This force is not a willed domination, a thought-out, calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, a Niagara Falls waiting to drench Dunbar as soon as he is in a position to assume absolute control. Once he has moved into that position, he is resurrected as a new man, a distinctive man—a different man. And whatever his social status in London, in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle, more man. The site of his transformation is within rawness: he is backgrounded by savagery. (43-44)  

 Here’s another passage from Morrison that speaks to this more oblique mode of reading:

Explicit or implicit, the Africanist presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American literature. It is a dark and abiding presence, there for the literary imagination as both a visible and an invisible mediating force. Even, and especially, when American texts are not ‘about’ Africanist presences or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature) understood their ‘Americanness’ as an opposition to the resident black population. Race, in fact, now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of Americanness that it rivals the old pseudo-scientific and class-informed racisms whose dynamics we are more used to deciphering. (Morrison, 46-47)

It’s in passages like these that one gets a hint of the ambition and scope of this argument -- it goes to the core of the construction of Americanness itself. One way for critics to try and prove her assertion (in such a short book I think we have to take her readings as suggestive rather than as proven by evidence) might be to go deeper into the ways in which what she calls the Africanist other was a constitutive presence and absence from other works in the American canon. (And since this book was published American literature scholars have been doing this, in a growing sub-field focused on “whiteness studies.” ) 

--Amardeep Singh, Professor of English. Lehigh University. April 2021 Feel free to email me with questions or comments: amsp [at] lehigh [dot] edu 

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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

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Black matters: Toni Morrison is the new Nobel laureate for literature. Here, we print an extract from her writing on whiteness and the literary imagination

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WHAT Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary 'blackness', the nature - even the cause - of literary 'whiteness'. What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as 'American'? If such an inquiry ever comes to maturity, it may provide access to a deeper reading of American literature - a reading not completely available now, not least, I suspect, because of the studied indifference of most literary criticism to these matters.

One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognise an already discredited difference. To enfore its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and scholarly moeurs that has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access to remarkable insights in their works.

These moeurs are delicate things, however, which must be given some thought before they are abandoned. Not observing such niceties can lead to startling displays of scholarly lapses in objectivity. In 1936 an American scholar (Killis Campbell) investigating the use of Negro so-called dialect in the works of Edgar Allan Poe (a short article clearly proud of its racial equanimity) opens this way: 'Despite the fact that he grew up largely in the South and spent some of his most fruitful years in Richmond and Baltimore, Poe has little to say about the darky.'

Although I know this sentence represents the polite parlance of the day, that 'darky' was understood to be a term more acceptable than 'nigger', the grimace I made upon reading it was followed by an alarmed distrust of the scholar's abilities. Let me assure you, equally egregious representations of the phenomenon are still common.

Another reason for this quite ornamental vacuum in literary discourse on the presence and influence of Africanist peoples in American criticism is the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim - of always defining it asymetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes. A good deal of time and intelligence has been invested in the exposure of racism and the horrific results on its objects. There are constant, if erratic, liberalising efforts to legislate these matters. There are also powerful and persuasive attempts to analyse the origin and fabrication of racism itself, contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable, permanent and eternal part of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries. But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalysed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject.

Literary scholars have begun to pose these questions of various national literatures. Urgently needed is the same kind of attention paid to the literature of the western country that has one of the most resilient Africanist populations in the world - a population that has always had a curiously intimate and unhingingly separate existence within the dominant one.

Like thousands of avid but non-academic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. What is fascinating, however, is to observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy - an informing, stabilising and disturbing element - in the literature they do study.

It is possible, for example, to read Henry James scholarship exhaustively and never arrive at a nodding mention, much less a satisfactory treatment, of the black woman who lubricates the turn of the plot and becomes the agency of moral choice and meaning in What Maisie Knew. It is hard to think of any aspect of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives that has not been covered, except the exploratory and explanatory uses to which she puts the black woman who holds centre stage in that work. The critics see no excitement or meaning in the tropes of darkness, sexuality, and desire in Ernest Hemingway or in his cast of black men.

An instructive parallel to this willed scholarly indifference is the centuries-long, hysterical blindness to feminist discourse and the way in which women and women's issues were read (or unread).

My early assumptions as a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers. Other than as the objects of an occasional bout of jungle fever, other than to provide local colour or to lend some touch of verisimilitude or to supply a needed moral gesture, humour or bit of pathos, blacks made no appearance at all. This was a reflection, I thought, of the marginal impact that blacks had on the lives of the characters in the work as well as the creative imagination of the author. To imagine or write otherwise, to situate black people throughout the pages and scenes of a book like some government quota, would be ludicrous and dishonest.

But then I stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer. Living in a racially articulated and predicated world, I could not be alone in reacting to this aspect of the American cultural and historical condition. I began to see how the literature I revered, the literature I loathed, behaved in its encounter with racial ideology. American literature could not help being shaped by that encounter.

Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, but equally important, I wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it. Much more important was to contemplate how Africanist personae, narrative and idiom moved and enriched the text in selfconscious ways, to consider what the engagement meant for the work of the writer's imagination.

How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work? As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing 'happens': Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative - displays of the agile writer's technical expertise. I assumed that since 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', unracialised, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop.

As a writer reading, I came to realise the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona 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.

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl - the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles travelling to the surface - and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.

What became transparent were the self- evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.

This is an abridged excerpt from Toni Morrison's essay 'Black Matters', contained in 'Playing in the Dark', Harvard University Press, 1992; cloth, pounds 11.95.

(Photograph omitted)

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Toni Morrison as an African American Voice: A Marxist Analysis

• Published: 07 January 2021
• Volume 25 , pages 22–28, ( 2021 )

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• Irfan Mehmood 1 ,
• Komal Ansari 2 &
• M. K. Sangi 3  

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This article will endeavor to discover the presence of Marxist ideology, in Morrison’s, novels, The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Marxism is a literary theory which focuses on class struggle and materialism. Toni Morrison writes about the culture in which she lives and from which she neither consciously nor emotionally escapes. The Marxist literary ideology focuses on the weak economic position of proletariat class and spotlights bourgeoisie class as a dominant capitalist. This article will explore that how Morrison has used Marxist ideology in her fictional work to highlight the suppression of Afro-American community.

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Mehmood, I., Ansari, K. & Sangi, M.K. Toni Morrison as an African American Voice: A Marxist Analysis. J Afr Am St 25 , 22–28 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-020-09509-z

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Home Issues 11-1 “Black Matters”: Race and Literar...

“Black Matters”: Race and Literary History in Mat Johnson’s Pym

After being denied tenure for expanding his teaching of race and literary history beyond exclusively African American texts, Chris Jaynes, the protagonist of Mat Johnson’s novel Pym (2011), sets out to retrace the voyage from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . This essay examines how Johnson uses Jaynes’ own shipwreck—he and his crew are stranded in Antarctica—to posit the history of race in the United States as a national disaster that overdetermines contemporary social dynamics. Using intertextuality and satire, Johnson follows Toni Morrison’s precedent in depicting blackness and whiteness as constructs that are inextricably bound and that cannot be understood one without the other. Central to this claim are Johnson’s mirroring of the progressive, 21 st -century African American Jaynes with his narrative foil: the pickled, ancient Anglo American Arthur Gordon Pym. I contend that Johnson not only revisits Morrison’s argument but also expands upon it; for, as Jaynes and his fellow characters confront the thorny legacy of race and racism in the United States, they must also face a future in which the country’s changing demographics will render questions of identity more, rather than less, complicated.

Index terms

Keywords: .

1 There is an eerie correspondence between “Black Matters,” the title of the first chapter of Toni Morrison’s essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and Black Lives Matter, the movement created in 2012 after the exoneration of George Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin (Garza, n.p.). Though separated by the span of twenty years, both chapter title and activist call raise the questions of how and why race continues to be important in American society, with Morrison focusing on the literary canon and contemporary activists taking on the spate of highly publicized, extrajudicial killings of black women and men that have punctuated life in the 2010s United States. Both book and movement posit a long, critical view of history as a prerequisite for understanding the dynamics of U.S. conceptions of race and iterations of anti-black racism. Whereas Morrison argues that Black(ness) matters because one cannot understand whiteness without appreciating the other against which it is constructed, today’s activists assert that black lives matter because they, too, warrant the “basic human rights and dignity” more readily accorded white lives (“About Us”).

2 To juxtapose Morrison’s literary criticism with the political work of Black Lives Matter is not to be flip but, rather, to consider the often inextricable relationship between literary text and social context. As scholar Ashraf H. A. Rushdy argues, the “cultural conversation [‘comprising literary and extraliterary issues’] occurs within the field of cultural production but is nonetheless a refraction of the struggles in the social order within which that field is situated” (14, 15). The publication of Playing in the Dark came on the heels of a decade that brought the presidency of Ronald Reagan and saw the emergence of two figures, “the welfare queen” and the menacing criminal, who were ostensibly unraced but nonetheless became vehicles for positioning African Americans as foreign rather than integral to American identity. The former rose to national prominence “during Reagan’s failed 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination” (Kohler-Hausmann 335). In campaign speeches, Reagan used the case of Linda Taylor, an Illinois woman charged with defrauding the state’s social service programs, as an example of how such programs wasted taxpayer dollars. The latter figure emerged in the person of Willie Horton at the end of Reagan’s second term as president. In conjunction with an advertisement released by an independent group, then Vice President George H. W. Bush cited Horton, a convicted murderer who assaulted a couple while released on a furlough program, as a reason that the country would not be safe if Massachusetts governor—and Democratic nominee—Michael Dukakis were elected president.

3 On the surface, the Taylor and Horton cases were matters of fiscal responsibility and public safety, respectively. As scholars have noted, however, race was pivotal in each as both Taylor and Horton were African American. Historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann has argued that the reforms built around stereotypes such as that of the welfare queen “help[ed] solidify the public perception of a racialized, criminal ‘culture of poverty’” (330). Likewise, political scientist Tali Mendelberg has observed that, although Horton’s story was but one talking point in Bush’s discussion of crime, the “case […] was saturated with racial meaning” via its imagery, especially the circulation of the young black man’s mug shot by the media (138). The Taylor and Horton stories indicate that the ever-present yet suppressed blackness that Toni Morrison deems “Africanism” and discusses within American literary history is not, in fact, limited to “the field of cultural production.” On the contrary, “denotative and connotative blackness” has also served as a means of “talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability” in the world beyond the page (Morrison 6, 7).

4 Deeply informed by Morrison’s landmark work, Matt Johnson’s satirical novel Pym (2011) likewise invites the reader to contemplate the relationship between literary text and social context. Johnson revisits one of the examples featured in Playing in the Dark —Edgar Allan Poe’s nautical adventure The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)—to explore how race and racism remain pervasive elements of twenty-first-century American society. His protagonist is Chris Jaynes, an urbane black Philadelphian recently fired from his position as an English professor at a liberal arts college. Intent on proving that Dirk Peters, a character from Poe’s Narrative , actually existed, Chris enlists a motley crew to retrace the itinerary described in Poe’s novel. Johnson inverts his predecessor’s chromatic and geographic scheme by having his African American characters land in Antarctica, where they stumble upon a settlement of massive white monsters and, among them, an ancient, pickled Arthur Gordon Pym, whose life and nineteenth-century racism have been preserved in the frigid climate. Where Poe’s Narrative concludes with a vision of perfect, all-encompassing whiteness, Johnson’s Pym closes with Chris and his friend Garth landing in a mysterious place where a vision of warm, reassuring brownness greets them.

5 Yet Johnson’s task in resurrecting Poe’s work is not to celebrate how multicultural the United States has become since the mid-nineteenth century. Like Morrison before him, Johnson encourages his readers to take a long view of history; indeed, Pym presents the antebellum United States of sometime Baltimorean Poe and the “colorblind” nation in which Chris resides as points along a troubled, underexamined continuum rather than as discrete eras. Johnson’s characters, black and white, alternately reject and embrace the fixed, racialized roles that early-twenty-first century society still expects them to play. Consequently, although the explicit reason for Chris’ quest is to verify a rare manuscript that has been attributed to Peters, his implicit mission is to decode the meaning behind, and to escape from, the long life of race in the United States.

6 That said, Chris’ fascination with the Peters manuscript serves as more than a plot device. Johnson uses the artifact to cast his literary net even wider to include not only the seafaring tale but also the neo-slave narrative. Dating the genre to the 1970s and 1980s, Rushdy locates the neo-slave narrative’s “origins in the social, intellectual, and racial formations of the [1960s]” and contends that its texts also “engage […] in dialogue with the social issues of [their] moment of origin” (3, 5). With Dirk Peters’ account of his service at sea and Chris’ report of his time in Antarctica, Johnson creates a multi-layered neo-slave narrative that speaks to the ways that the early 2000s, like the 1960s, have represented a period of both promise and peril for Americans of African descent. As the passage of major civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, respectively, was followed by the assassinations of black leaders such as Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first U.S. president of African descent has been succeeded by the repeal of significant portions of the Voting Rights Act and the heightened awareness of anti-black violence (“The Voting Rights Act: A Resource Page”). Indeed, the April 2015 death of African American Freddie Gray in police custody, and the uprisings that followed, prompted many observers to compare present-day Baltimore to the city in April 1968, when the assassination of King provoked two weeks of unrest. i

7 Johnson also confronts the paradox of his historical moment by using humor, particularly satire, to explore how blackness and black lives mattered in the nineteenth-century United States and how their twenty-first-century manifestations resonate with their antecedents. Corresponding to Darryl Dickson-Carr’s characterization of “the African American satirical novel” as a text that features “unremitting iconoclasm, criticism of the current status of African American political and cultural trends, and indictment of specifically American forms of racism,” Johnson reveals the degree to which the nation’s racist past reverberates in the lives of his madcap cast of characters (16). As refracted through their improbable adventures, the history of race in the United States is a constitutive element of contemporary social dynamics. Furthermore, blackness and whiteness are inextricably bound constructs not simply for Pym the antiquated racist and Chris the scholar of race but also for everyone around them, from the proud black nationalist to the staunch Tea Party conservative. Finally, in a more frightening vein, one might also read Pym as suggesting that, because race and racism seem to be inescapable in organized societies, the only way to end recurring patterns of alienation, exploitation, and inequality is to end the world itself. In other words, one might argue that, far from suggesting a postracial paradise, Pym takes a key question of 1960s civil rights movements—that of whether substantive, lasting change can best be effected through reform or revolution—and proposes a third, even more disruptive option: apocalypse.

1. “What’s Past Is Prologue”: Morrison, Poe, and Johnson

8 Appreciating the historical critique in Pym requires revisiting the works that set the literary-critical stage for Johnson’s raucous satire. As indicated above, Morrison’s Playing in the Dark challenges assertions of American literature as the exclusive “preserve of white male views, genius, and power [that] are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States” (5). Counter to such visions, Morrison diagnoses what she calls “American Africanism” as “a disabling virus within literary discourse” that can be located in the work of such canonical mainstays as Poe, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway (7). It is “inextricable from the definition of Americanness,” and to fail to appreciate this relationship is to neglect the multilayered dimensions of American literature (Morrison 65). Thus, Playing in the Dark presents the color “black” and the race(s) it evokes as integral elements of American culture, as subjects (“matters”) that warrant further examination and that carry great weight (“matter”).

9 According to Morrison, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is central to understanding the enduring presence of blackness in the American psyche. Partially published as a serial in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837 and released as a novel by Harper & Brothers the following year, the Narrative chronicles the travels of its title character, a white New England teenager who, with the help of his best friend Augustus, stows away on the whaling ship Grampus . After a mutiny and treacherous weather dispense with most of the ship and its crew, Pym, Augustus, and “hybrid” (European-Native American) Dirk Peters resort to cannibalism before Augustus succumbs to injuries sustained during the mutiny (Poe 57). Rescued by the British schooner Jane Guy , Pym and Peters join their new ship’s voyage to the South Seas and the tropical island of Tsalal. Inhabited by black “savages” who eventually ambush the Jane Guy ’s crew, Tsalal is Pym and Peters’ final stop before, accompanied by islander Nu-Nu, they sail into an unspecified, but overwhelmingly white, horizon (Poe 163).

10 “Romancing the Shadow,” Morrison’s second chapter, opens with an extended citation of Poe’s vision of whiteness. Adrift in the Antarctic Ocean, Pym, Peters, and Nu-Nu travel by canoe in a scene rich with contrasting images of dark and light. At one moment they are beneath “[a] sullen darkness”; at another they are overtaken by a “white ashy shower” (Poe 217). In the novel’s final paragraph, the darkness “materially increase[s]” only to give way to the other end of the color scale: “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow” (Poe 217). Morrison reads the scene as evidence of the persistent coupling of whiteness and blackness in American literature, of the use of the latter to distinguish and buttress the former. Like the nation whose identity it emerged to represent, early American literature had to negotiate the excitement and anxiety of freedom, and figurations of darkness, indicative of “the not-free” (the country’s enslaved population) and “the not-me” (the character of African rather than European descent), were central to that negotiation (Morrison 38). Blackness, however, is not solely a matter of negation. Morrison brings her reading to a close with the claim that Johnson will take up in his novel’s narrative climax: blackness and whiteness are mutually constitutive, and “[w]hiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable” (Morrison 59).

11 Morrison’s study and others interrogating the role of race in Poe have prompted much debate among Poe scholars. Critic John C. Havard describes the prevailing camps as those who deem the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym “a simple reflection of racist, proslavery thought” (107) and those who, like Havard and Dana D. Nelson, read the novel as a more sophisticated, more nuanced engagement with said thought. Scholar David Faflik likewise writes that Poe infused his novel with racist imagery to cater to the tastes of antebellum readers, not to advance a particular political agenda, and that to label Poe a racist Southerner is to ignore his varied background along with the regional complexity of the United States (283). ii However, it is important to note that, although Morrison deems the “Africanist presence” a predominant part of American literary discourse in Poe and elsewhere, she refrains from labeling any of the authors she discusses “racist” (Morrison 6). Indeed, she concludes Playing in the Dark by clarifying that her “deliberations are not about a particular author’s attitudes toward race” (Morrison 90). Similarly, my primary purpose here is not to read Mat Johnson’s reimagining of Pym as evidence that Poe was racist. Instead, my interest lies in how Poe’s Narrative reflects its author’s context, a society in which “the vast majority of white Americans, from the most virulent proponent of slavery to the most radical abolitionist, held racist views of some sort” (Havard 108), and in the correspondences that Johnson finds between that period and the one in which he sets Chris’ story. In other words, it is not Poe that matters as much as it is the historical and fictional lives of race in his work and beyond. iii

12 In Pym , whose opening pages signal Johnson’s debt to Morrison, the inquiry into the power and persistence of race begins in a setting often thought to be a bastion of progressive thought: a selective liberal arts college nestled in a picturesque Northeastern town. It is this institution, however, that denies Chris promotion with tenure for, among other things, his insistence on teaching the unpopular course “Dancing with the Darkies: Whiteness in the Literary Mind” (Johnson 7). By riffing on Morrison’s title, Johnson situates Chris as heir to her call to investigate the nation’s “racial pathology” through the study of early American literature (8). Through the usage of the epithet “darky,” Johnson also casts his protagonist as a picaro whose glib, disruptive behavior will “lay bare the normative constructions of positive social values as false and illusory” (Dickson-Carr 36). As a result, while failing to meet an institution’s pedagogical goals may read as valid grounds for dismissal, the circumstances leading up to and following Chris’ firing prove to be far more troubling. For if Morrison reads Poe and his peers in order to consider the implications of nineteenth-century racial constructions for “the served” and their descendants, Johnson chooses to foreground the ramifications of race and racism for the descendants of those charged with “serving” (Morrison 90).

13 Although the psychological and physical toll of nineteenth-century enslavement only exists in Chris’ life as an object of study, and his academic position shields him from twenty-first-century iterations of physical labor, he discovers that “service” remains a fraught, racialized issue in his seemingly ideal professional environment. Rather than being perceived as groundbreaking or important, Chris’ introduction of the topic of race into the presumably neutral domain of “American” literature is deemed transgressive, as is his refusal to sit on the Diversity Committee . “‘Everyone has a role to play,’” the college president intones to the newly fired Chris, and by failing “to purvey the minority perspective,” he has rendered himself useless to his employer (14, 13). In brief, his role at the institution was to diversify the predominantly white campus by embodying blackness, not by critiquing the category and its analogues.

14 Johnson complicates his exploration of racialized service via Chris’ (re)turn to Poe after his firing. For the character’s struggle with race is not only a question of escaping demands that he play the part of the “Professional Negro” but also of recognizing his own desire to categorize identity (7). This longing informs Chris’ interest in a tattered manuscript attributed to Dirk Peters, the tenacious mixed-race sailor from Poe’s Narrative ; in his mind, it is Peters who performs the role of “the serviceable and serving black figure”—a part that Morrison attributes to Poe’s Tsalal native Nu-Nu—and whose life story, if verified, will unlock the mysteries of race in the U.S. (Morrison 32). Although Poe initially presents Peters as “the son of an Indian squaw [and] a fur trader,” shortly thereafter he describes the character as having “Herculean” limbs and an “immense” head “with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes)” (Poe 49). Chris contends that this language, which recalls stereotypes of African Americans as monstrous and inhuman, suggests that Peters’ non-Native American half is of African rather than European descent. iv Consequently, as Poe’s Peters eventually ascends to whiteness toward the end of the Narrative , when Pym describes the two of them as “the only living white men upon the island” after the Tsalalians attack the Jane Guy crew, so Johnson’s version (of Peters) gradually inhabits blackness over the course of Chris’ analysis (Poe 188). The latter reading is apparently confirmed by Chris’ acquisition of the aforementioned Peters memoir, which includes an illustration of its author as “a pale man, mulatto by feature and skin tone: his hair hinting at the slightest of kink, thin lips betrayed by a wide nose and the high West African cheekbones” (Johnson 38). v

15 The transformation is “apparent” rather than “certain” because if Poe and his Anglo American peers used blackness, as Morrison argues, to consolidate whiteness, Johnson and African American contemporaries such as Percival Everett and Danzy Senna juxtapose racial categories in order to complicate blackness. vi While the consolidation of identities still appears in these early twenty-first century texts, it tends to function as a target of critique rather than as a desired narrative end. This dynamic manifests itself in Pym through the double-edged nature of Chris’ interest in Dirk Peters, and through his satirical lens Johnson directs the reader to ask how Peters operates as a “serviceable and serving black figure,” to revisit Morrison, for the beleaguered African American academic (Chris) as much as he does for the antebellum white author (Poe). If Chris can authenticate The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters , he promises to revive his academic career, but if he can validate his reading of Peters as black he is poised to do something that is perhaps far more difficult: stabilize an identity—his own—that is more precarious than he would like to admit.

16 Johnson extends this narrative thread via the character of Mahalia Mathis, a Gary, Indiana, resident and Peters’ descendant to whom Chris turns for information; their first conversation reveals a clear disconnect between their respective interpretations of her racial identity:

“I am of Greek, Hopi, Crow, Blackfoot, Chinese, and Danish descent,” she interrupted me to declare immediately after I mentioned the genealogical page on her [web]site. Hearing this, I poked my head back at the computer screen to look at the image of the Negro there looking back at me. (Johnson 46)

17 The immediate purpose of this incongruity is to present Mrs. Mathis and other members of her civic group, the “Native American Ancestry Collective of Gary (NAACG),” as tragicomic figures (52). Their protestations to the contrary, the group looks to Chris “like any gathering of black American folks, some tan and most brown,” and the genetic tests they order indicate that their resources might be better invested in the civil rights organization with a similar acronym but different purpose: the NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (53). In brief, Chris aligns Mrs. Mathis and friends with the tradition of black Americans’ claiming Native American heritage in order to downplay, if not deny, having African ancestry. vii

18 While Chris paints the NAACG episode with a farcical brush, Johnson invites a more careful consideration of the politics of identity. Garth Frierson, Chris’ best friend, responds to a laughter-filled account of the Gary expedition by charging Chris with having a narrow, condescending view of blackness: “‘So that’s it, everybody has to play their roles, right? Black people can’t be Indians, don’t matter what’s in their blood or how they was raised or what the freedman did for red folk’” (57). In Garth’s eyes, Chris is no better than the administrator who chided him for not performing the part of “Professor of African American Literature” to the college’s expectations. One might also read Garth’s assessment as a charge that Chris is playing another role all too well. In keeping with Dickson-Carr’s study of the African American satirical novel, Johnson positions Chris as a means of taking on “the current status of African American political and cultural trends,” in this case the figure of the conscientized black intellectual who is so invested in tackling white supremacy that he is unable to see how his critical approach might produce its own limited and limiting conceptions of identity and belonging (16).

19 Instead of advancing his interrogation of race and racism, Chris’ views blind him to the complexity of Mrs. Mathis’ subject position as well as his own. In the essay “Why Most Black People Aren’t ‘Part Indian,’” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reflects that, even with significant statistical evidence to the contrary, “ it was much easier for black people to invent a putative Native American ancestor to explain mixed-race features and hair textures than to confront the terrible fact that we have so much European ancestry because of forced or cajoled sexuality during slavery ” (n. pag.). This observation suggests that Mrs. Mathis’ reaction to her DNA test, along with that of her fellow NAACG members, may indeed be rooted in denial, but not denial of African ancestry tout court so much as of the “monstrous intimacies,” to borrow from Christina Sharpe, through which African and European Americans coexisted in the antebellum era (Sharpe 3). In a discussion of the usage of visual imagery in anti- and pro-slavery arguments, Sharpe asserts that photographs of “pure” Africans served the latter position because of the presumption that “injury [caused by sexual violence] cannot be read on the unmiscegenated black body” (12). The unstated inverse of Sharpe’s claim is that injury can be read on the miscegenated black body, and it is perhaps this legacy of injury, violence, and subjection that Mrs. Mathis and her peers wish to eschew in favor of their adoption of Native American heritage. However problematic, such an affiliation nonetheless provides access to an inheritance of sovereignty and nobility.

20 The issue of the miscegenated black body is even more pertinent to Chris’ construction of his own identity. When Chris castigates Mrs. Mathis’ reluctant blackness, Garth retorts, “‘You [ sic ] so scared someone’s going to kick you off Team Negro that you think everybody’s got to stick to some crazy one-drop rule’” (57). Hypodescent, the practice of using the identity of the “more socially subordinate parent” to “determin[e] the classification of a child of mixed-race ancestry” (Riley), functions here not to protect whiteness but to reinforce Chris’ otherwise tenuous claim to blackness. The import of Dirk Peters’ identity, then, both intersects with and extends beyond the literary historical mystery that Chris hopes to solve. Offered mid-way through Pym , Chris’ self-portrait exposes the more immediate reason he may be drawn to the “pale man” in the frontispiece of Peters’ memoir. The passage bears citation at length:

I am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I’m not. […] Mandatory ethnic signifiers in summary: my hair is fairly straight, the curl loose and lazy; my skin lacks melanin—there are some Italians out there darker than me. My lips are full and my nose is broad, but it’s really just the complexion and hair that count. […] I am a black man who looks white. (135)

21 Earlier in the novel Chris speaks of the eternal American quest for “a romanticized ancestral home,” a geographic construct in which one can anchor one’s identity (30). His confession of racial indeterminacy proposes reading “home” in an additional manner, as an affective construct that entails finding shelter and stability within oneself. In this vein, what matters is not how Poe, Mrs. Mathis, or Chris views Dirk Peters, or how others read Chris’ racial identity, but how the characters define themselves.

2.Racial Revision and the Specter of History

22 Rather than elide race, then, Johnson revises notions of identity in order to depict the myriad ways that race is chosen, experienced, and, manifested in the lives of his characters. Indeed, Chris’ relationship to blackness is not the only one considered in Pym . He and Garth become best friends in middle school because neither of them conforms to expected notions of black boyhood in their “working-class neighborhood in […] ‘Black is Beautiful era’” Philadelphia: the former is ostracized because he is a “symbol of Whiteness and all the negative connotations it held,” the latter because he is a nerd who “[wears] his Boy Scout uniform every day” (135, 136). The boys take refuge in the school library, where Chris develops a love for African American literature and Garth a passion for art history. Johnson continues to complicate the character’s blackness into his adulthood, during which Garth becomes a devoted fan of fictional artist Thomas Karvel. Much like the work of Thomas Kinkade, his historical analogue, Garth’s treasured Karvel prints have little to do with African diasporic places or people; if anything, these bucolic landscapes suggest the mythic American homeland that Chris contemplates when studying Poe’s fiction and that, through concepts such as manifest destiny, was believed to be the exclusive province of white Americans (15). viii

23 Johnson further destabilizes the notion that blackness is in any way monolithic with his characterization of the other members of Chris’ Antarctic expedition. His cousin Booker Jaynes, “probably the world’s only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver,” heads the group (70), and two couples complete the roster: Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, water treatment specialists and creators of “an ‘Afro-Adventure Blog,’” and Angela and Nathaniel Latham, Chris’ ex-girlfriend and her second husband (76). As Chris assembles a crew for the appropriately named Creole Mining Company, so Johnson collects a range of archetypes through which to parse contemporary African American identity. With his historically evocative name, flowing dreadlocks, and dog named “White Folks,” Booker embodies the figure of the black nationalist (99); with their expensive gear and omnipresent camera, Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter represent social media celebrities as well as gay urbanites; and, with their impressive academic credentials and social connections, Angela and Nathan epitomize upwardly mobile professionals. Early in his 2011 book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now , social critic Touré notes that “[i]f there are forty million Black people in America then there are forty million ways to be Black” (20). Johnson cannot cover as broad a spectrum within the confines of Pym , but he nonetheless presents a diverse assortment of African Americanness.

24 One can trace his interest in part to Morrison’s consideration of how people of African descent are not inherently uniform but have been reduced to uniformity by legal, social, and literary constructions. In Playing in the Dark , she identifies six “linguistic strategies” used to manage the Africanist presence in American literature: “[e]conomy of stereotype,” “[m]etonymic displacement,” “[m]etaphysical condensation,” “[f]etishization,” “[d]ehistoricizing allegory,” and “[p]atterns of explosive, disjointed, repetitive language” (67-69). These strategies echo the dehumanizing methods deployed to justify and perpetuate the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. For example, Morrison explains that in metonymic displacement “[c]olor coding and other physical traits become metonyms that displace rather than signify the Africanist character” (68). While the previously mentioned practice of hypodescent can disrupt the power of skin color, that disruption depends on knowledge of the mixed-race person’s background.

25 Although Johnson’s revision of racial scripts resists such displacement, his characters cannot escape the specter of history. Chris and company travel to Antarctica thinking of themselves as intrepid modern explorers, with Chris intent on verifying Dirk Peters’ account and the others intent on making money from Booker’s mining scheme. Yet when they stumble across Pym, miraculously alive in the twenty-first century, his language and outlook take them back in time: “‘So tell me, then,’” Pym inquires of Chris, “‘have you brought these slaves for trading?’” (Johnson 134). The question disregards the possibility that Chris might identify as other than white and flattens the differences that the narrative has so carefully ascribed to his fellow travelers. In Pym’s mind, phenotype connotes race, and race determines whether one is enslaved or free. The humorous component of Johnson’s novel might tempt one to dismiss Pym as a delusional relic from the past, as Chris himself wishes to do, but the critical element of that humor prompts one to confront how, as Sharpe asserts, “all modern subjects are post-slavery subjects fully constituted by the discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery” (3). If not directly impacted by modern-day iterations of the dehumanization, violence, and submission that characterized the antebellum period (with such experiences being the impetus behind the Black Lives Matter movement), the relative freedom lived by Chris and his friends is still, Sharpe would argue, haunted by this tragic legacy. In other words, Johnson’s fictional manifestation of this inheritance may be fantastic, but the historical subtext of his narrative is all too credible.

26 Lest one reject this provocative collapse of historical time and social progress, Johnson doubles down on his engagement with the neo-slave narrative by imagining the enslavement of his “post-slavery” characters. After a botched trade deal with the Tekelians, the white snow monsters with whom Pym resides, everyone except Garth is indentured to the creatures for one hundred years. ix Effectively enslaved, Chris, Booker, Angela, Nathaniel, and Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter are joined in their shared bondage and utter lack of preparation for their predicament. As Chris confesses, “Turns out […] that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave” (Johnson 160). The characters’ personalities re-emerge as they adapt to and cope with captivity; their reactions run the gamut from Jeffree’s open resistance to Nathan’s cultural entrepreneurship. Others, like Booker and Chris, form affective bonds with their captors. Regardless of their respective strategies, however, each character finds himself in a contemporary rendering of the Hegelian dialectic: he must assert his identity in opposition to or in cooperation with that of his owner (Hegel, 228-240).

27 If blackness as lived and experienced beyond the confines of racist thought is always already diverse and multiple, then whiteness is also a construction that obscures the many ways in which that identity is lived. Johnson first allows for the complexity of whiteness via his narrator’s musings about the landscape; during an excursion with Garth, Chris discovers that although the “Antarctic gives the impression of being white, […] really it’s blue. Almost entirely constructed of that pale, powder blue that at times can darken to a rich, cobalt haze, as it did now around me” (95-96). This passage recalls the original Pym’s reaction to Tsalal; the island’s darkness may seem constant, but it is not. The water, Pym observes, “was not colourless , nor was it of any one uniform colour —presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk” (Poe 168). Where Johnson departs from Poe is in his extension of this depth and variety to his white characters, a consideration that Poe does not allow the Tsalalians, whom he depicts as uniformly ignorant and savage.

28 As with all aspects of Pym , Johnson’s examination of whiteness requires that the reader appreciate the novel’s polyvocality. In his introductory images of the Tekelians, from their embodiment of the “shrouded,” perfectly white figure at the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to their menacing homogeneity, Johnson seems to channel his literary antecedent (Poe 217). Of the first encounter between the Tekelians and the Creole crew, Chris remembers,

Their size alone, their towering presence, would have been enough to provide a spectacle. Given my own height of six four, I would have to say that their median height was at least seven four or higher. Their bodies were mountainous and hidden, covered in hooded capes that hung broadly from the shoulders and concealed their bulk in folds. […] The only things that were clearly visible were their heads, and those were what froze us. What I at first glance had assumed to be horrific masks proved instead to be their actual faces . The color, or lack of it, was striking” (emphasis in original, 124-125).

29 With their “hooded capes” and menacing stature, the Tekelians evoke the similarly attired Ku Klux Klan, the hate group known for perpetrating anti-black, anti-Semitic violence in the United States. Johnson underscores this connection by naming Chris’ owner “Krakeer,” a moniker that echoes the epithet “cracker,” which is commonly used as an insult for poor Southern whites (163). Yet just as “cracker” identity, which scholars have traced to ethnicity (in this case, Celtic origin) rather than social class, is more complex than regional stereotypes allow, so the Tekelians have an array of temperaments and occupy different positions in their society’s hierarchy. x Krakeer, whom Chris renames “Augustus…in honor of Pym’s fallen shipmate,” lives in modest conditions and feels guilty when he is unable to feed Chris properly (163). He is “soft and harmless,” in stark contrast to Barro, the powerful, wealthy Tekelian who responds to Jeffree’s defiance by stabbing him (170). Like American whiteness in Morrison’s analysis, Tekelian identity is consolidated only in opposition to external difference.

30 Consequently, although Pym worships the Tekelians as “perfection incarnate,” he, too, occupies a liminal position, albeit not an enslaved one, within Tekeli-li (140). Unassailable in his nineteenth-century New England context, Pym’s whiteness is diminished by his humanity in his adopted twenty-first century Antarctic setting. Because he is a different species than the Tekelians, he is an outcast who is at odds with society biologically as well as temporally. Chris discovers the precarity of Pym’s position on a visit to a Tekelian bar. Well versed in the interplay of geography, race, and socioeconomic status in the nineteenth-century U.S., in which being the descendant of a prominent New England family usually entailed some degree of privilege, Chris assumes that Pym is the establishment’s owner. Yet Pym is neither the proprietor nor a customer; instead, he passes his time waiting to consume the scraps discarded by Tekelian patrons. His ability to communicate with the Creole crew may have temporarily improved his status, but it has not made his whiteness equal to that of the creatures that he celebrates as “the Gods” (199).

31 A different, contemporary example of decontextualized whiteness emerges in the figure of Garth’s beloved artist Thomas Karvel, whom Garth tracks down while his friends are enslaved. xi In Karvel’s case, decontextualization serves as a means of bolstering, not diluting, his identity. The Dome of Light, the high-tech refuge that the artist has built for his wife and himself, is a collage of different Karvel paintings, with palm trees in one area and an authentic English cottage in another. In contrast to the exterior Antarctic “snow with its frozen white death,” the Dome’s interior is color-saturated, warm, and vibrant (233). When explaining his relocation to Garth and Chris, who reunites with his friend after escaping Tekeli-li, Karvel never speaks of race, only of wanting to recreate “America without taxes, and big government, and terrorist bullshit” (236). Indeed, the African American newcomers are welcome to stay in the Dome as long as they produce their own food. If the Dome of Light was an all-white space before Chris and Garth’s arrival, it would seem that its racial exclusivity was circumstantial, the result of Mr. and Mrs. Karvel’s being its only residents, rather than intentional or discriminatory.

32 Karvel’s whiteness, however, is no more independent than that of his historical and literary predecessors. In presenting his “perfect world” to Chris and Garth, Karvel marshals language that recalls Morrison’s description of early European immigrants to the United States. If Morrison imagines these travelers viewing early America as a place where “[o]ne could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be inscribed” (35), Johnson has Karvel celebrate the Dome of Light as “‘a place without history. A place without stain. No yesterday, only tomorrow’” (241). Karvel believes that he has created a postracial paradise unsullied by the legacies of slavery and inequality that haunt the United States. Indeed, Karvel’s words echo the conclusion Chris reaches just before trading deathly cold for Technicolor comfort:

I saw it all become clear to me. That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from the pristine landscape. (Johnson 225)

33 In this moment of crisis-induced clarity, Chris fully grasps the articulation (in the sense of “linking or connecting”) of race and morality in the American psyche: to be white is to be superior and blameless, to fortify one’s identity through a necessary but, ultimately, expendable other (Edwards 11). It is this ideal whiteness that Karvel attempts to create, and sustain, in the isolated, pastoral world reconstructed from his paintings.

34 Chris and Garth’s presence in the Dome of Light not only reveals the correspondence between Chris’ critique of whiteness and Karvel’s vision but also exposes the cracks in the dome’s idyllic façade. While Garth delights in their new home’s Edenic wonders, Chris finds troubling reminders of American history at every turn. The cottage in which he and Garth are housed recalls the compromise through which delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention allotted legislative representation in the U.S. Congress: “ Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons ” ( U.S. Constitution , Art. 1, Sec. 2). The phrase “all other Persons” referred to enslaved people, the vast majority of whom were of African descent and, in this constitutional accounting, determined to be less than the “free persons” who were predominantly of European descent. In Pym , Chris and Garth’s cottage in the Dome of Light appears to be “the adjective quaint made manifest” with its “thatched roof,” “handblown glass” windows and “candlelight flickering behind each one” (242). Upon closer inspection, however, the building is really “three-fifths of a house” with an unfinished interior (244). Contrary to Chris’ initial concerns, black people can exist in Karvel’s fantasy world, but their existence is circumscribed and their access to resources limited.

35 Johnson further explores the workings of Karvel’s whiteness by addressing how race, gender, and nationality intersect in the construction and experience of identities. Early in Playing in the Dark Morrison identifies masculinity as a characteristic that is “championed” by the Eurocentric American literary canon; she later notes that the figure heralded by that canon was neither gender- nor race-neutral but, rather, “a new white man” (Morrison 5, 39). Similarly, Johnson depicts Thomas Karvel as a character who constructs his world around his gender identity as well as his artistry. In addition to leaving the United States to avoid taxes and other government oversight, he has sought to flee “‘[a]ll that PC nonsense [that] made men soft’” (Johnson 237). When Karvel discovers that his habitat’s palm trees do not bear coconuts, he demands that some be added because “‘[n]ature was created to serve man. And now this man wants some coconuts up there’” (252). Karvel’s interlocutor in the coconut exchange—and the other against which his gender is defined—is his wife. The character is known only as “Mrs. Karvel,” and, during Chris’ first days in the dome, he notes that “[she] seemed perpetually stressed, rarely out of motion any time I saw her. Standing still for a moment, without food or an emptied plate or a feather duster in her hand, seemed almost a painful act for her” (244). When Karvel insists on having coconuts, Mrs. Karvel rolls her eyes “like her corneas were going on a world tour,” but she also quietly and invisibly fulfills her husband’s wish (252).

36 Yet despite appearing to revolve solely around the Master of Light, Mrs. Karvel’s womanhood, like the other identities investigated in Pym , proves to be much more complicated. Mrs. Karvel is the engineer who realizes her husband’s artistic visions and, when necessary, recognizes their limitations; life in the Dome of Light would not be possible without her labor. As the aforementioned eye-roll suggests, Mrs. Karvel’s domestic efficiency is edgy, not cheery, and this sharpness becomes incontrovertible when the Tekelians attack the dome. Reaching back even further into the annals of American history, the Mistress of Light proposes an Antarctic Thanksgiving during which the Karvels and Tekelians can discuss their differences over “[g]ood home cooking” (278). Just as the first contact between European colonists and Native Americans resulted in the decimation of the latter group, so Mrs. Karvel’s generosity is a premise for a darker, genocidal plan: to serve the Tekelians “a good, strong supper” that will be laced with rat poison and, consequently, “take care of all [their] troubles” (279). The chilling stratagem exposes the true architecture of the Karvel marriage, for it is Mrs. Karvel’s strength, not her submission, which enables and supports her husband’s masculinity in the face of external challenges.

37 In addition to dispelling notions of Mrs. Karvel as a compliant helpmate, the deadly Tekelian supper rounds out Pym ’s study of the dimensions of whiteness. Although the Tekelians and Karvels share a skin color, they do not have a common cause. Conceived of as a self-contained, self-sustaining habitat, the Dome of Light becomes a fossil-fuel dependent environmental hazard after Thomas Karvel alters the original design. Once its supply chain is disrupted, Mrs. Karvel begins looking for a new home, and Tekeli-li strikes her as a promising location. The Antarctic natives, in contrast, descend on the dome because its “exhaust fan […] is blowing heat straight into Tekeli-li” (274). White or not, the Karvels are causing the destruction of the very site they envision colonizing. This antagonism bespeaks the “isolation, the separateness” that Morrison identifies as “always a part of any utopia” (Morrison 1998). Neither the Karvels’ Dome nor Pym’s Heaven (Tekeli-li) is equipped to accommodate outsiders; their respective residents only do so when prompted by exigent circumstances, and their reluctance to accept change ultimately causes the collapse of their respective societies.

3. Racial Utopias and the End(s) of the World

38 Like Poe’s Narrative before it, Johnson’s Pym ends on an intriguing yet inconclusive note. The poisoning of the Tekelians provokes a human-snow creature battle that results in the explosion of the Dome of Light and implosion of Tekeli-li. After traveling by boat for days, Chris, Garth, and Pym, the only survivors, reach land; Chris describes the scene that greets them as follows:

Rising up in our pathway was a man. He was naked except for the cloth that covered his loins. He was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him. […] On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority. (322)

39 The academic-turned-adventurer confesses that he cannot confirm whether they have reached Tsalal, and, given the skin color of its inhabitants, the land does not quite correspond to Chris’ fantasy, entertained at the novel’s beginning, of a “great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland […] uncorrupted by Whiteness” (39). By the novel’s end, however, perhaps Chris has come to realize the fallacy of such a vision in the twenty-first century. The simultaneous fall of Tekeli-li and the Dome of Light reveal that, even in the absence of racial difference, “great,” “uncorrupted” homelands are not immune to social conflict, ecological imperatives, or other challenges, be they anthropological or natural. In sending Chris and Garth to a place where blackness and whiteness have mingled to such a degree that they have ceased to be distinct categories, Johnson suggests a need to engage with multiculturalism not as an empty ideal but as a lived reality.

40 If the construct of race is as weighty and as contingent as Chris’ experience implies, what are the consequences for the world that he and his fellow characters have left behind? How viable is a society whose structure and self-identity are, as Morrison argues, so invested in something that is omnipresent and invisible, biologically inconsequential yet politically and socially significant? One of the fascinating aspects of Pym is that the annihilations of the Dome of Light and Tekeli-li are but two of multiple catastrophes, real and imagined, that appear in the novel. Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter’s blog features their video coverage of the September 11 attacks in New York City, and their search for excitement and heroism also prompts them to travel to Ohio “during the [fictional] Dayton Dirty Water Disaster” (77). In Antarctica, the Tekelians’ enslavement of the Creole crew is precipitated by an unexplained global cataclysm that cuts off the Americans’ contact with the outside world. Just prior to their departure for Tekeli-li, they all receive the same anonymous email message with no content save the “ominous […] subject line: ARMAGEDDON” (152). As noted toward the beginning of this essay, Morrison portrays whiteness in isolation as “dreaded, senseless, implacable” (59). I would argue that Johnson expands upon this contention to propose that Eurocentric perspectives disregard history, the humanity of others, and the far-reaching consequences of a community’s actions to the detriment of global society. More specifically, without serious, sustained attention to issues such as racialized violence, income inequality, and climate change, the wider world seems poised to follow Tekeli-li and the Dome of Light on the path to destruction.

41 Shortly after his firing, Chris meets the hip-hop scholar who has been hired to replace him. When Chris tries to explain his scholarly turn to Poe, the aptly named Mosaic Johnson snaps back, “‘Poe. Doesn’t. Matter’” (21). Although his name evokes cultural diversity, the fictional Johnson’s retort reveals his willingness to accept the superficial multiculturalism sought by the college administration in lieu of the substantive, often difficult engagement with difference that Chris seeks. Yet as Morrison argues in Playing in the Dark and Johnson elaborates in Pym , Poe and other white early American authors do matter if one wishes to understand the roots of race and racism in the United States. Likewise, blackness matters not because it is a fixed, immutable identity, but because it is a flexible, ever-changing one in and of itself and in relation to other categories. Whiteness also warrants examination and interrogation, Johnson contends, because it is not invisible, independent, or stable; instead, it is inextricably bound to the identities through and against which it is normalized and subject to its own internal divisions. In the end, Pym does not posit a postracial fantasy that enables its characters to escape the complications of race and history so much as it projects a multi-layered, multiracial world in which such complications might be acknowledged and worked through.

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Kohler-Hausmann, Julilly. “‘The Crime of Survival’: Fraud Prosecutions, Community Surveillance, and the Original ‘Welfare Queen.’” Journal of Social History 41.2 (2007): 329-354. Print.

Laurent, Olivier. “Go Behind TIME’s Baltimore Cover with Aspiring Photographer Devin Allen.” Lightbox . 30 Apr. 2015. Web. 14 May 2015.

McWhiney, Grady. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South . University, AL: U of Alabama P, 1988. Print.

Mendelberg, Tali. “Executing Hortons: Racial Crime in the 1988 Presidential Campaign.” Public Opinion Quarterly 61 (1997): 134-157. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth. PBS NewsHour . 9 March 1998. Broadcast.

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Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . 1838. Ed. and introd. Richard Kopley. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999. Print.

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Senna, Danzy. You Are Free: Stories . New York: Riverhead, 2011. Print.

Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects . Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

“The Voting Rights Act: A Resource Page,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law , 4 Aug. 2015. Web. 11 January 2016.

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i  The cover of the 11 May 2015 issue of Time magazine featured a black and white photograph of the April 2015 protests and the phrase “America, 1968” in white type. The “1968” has been crossed out and a red, apparently handwritten “2015” placed above it. See Laurent n. p. See also “Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth.”

ii  While Faflik’s claims about present-day scholars misconstruing, if not altogether dismissing, the importance of regional identities in the 19 th -century U.S. are convincing, his apparent attempt to disentangle questions of race from those of region is less so. The Yankee-Cavalier (Southerner) split Faflik outlines is incomplete without discussions of race (273-274), as is an analysis of relations among the U.S.-Mexico border, the location toward which Faflik turns his attention at the end of his essay (284-288).

iii  For another reading of representations of race in Poe’s novel, see Jessica Jacquel’s M.A. thesis.

iv  Havard argues that such representations were part of the “‘average’ [anti-black] racism” of the Narrative ’s time; he uses the term “average,” or typical, to reiterate his claim that the segregated nature of the antebellum United States led most Anglo Americans to hold anti-black views of some sort (108).

v  Johnson also uses the fictional Peters manuscript as an opportunity to reference Jules Verne’s 1897 novel Le Sphinx des glaces ( An Antarctic Mystery ), an earlier sequel to Poe’s Narrative . In Peters’ manuscript he recounts traveling to France to confront Verne about the use of his (Peters’) story.

vi  See, for example, Everett’s Erasure and Senna’ You Are Free: Stories .

vii  Zora Neale Hurston challenges this ethno-racial subterfuge at the beginning of her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in which she writes that she is “the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief” (Hurston 152).

viii  Karvel, whom Garth describes as the “Master of Light” (35), is a fictional double of Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012), the American artist known as the “Painter of Light” and famous for painting “bucolic scenes of cozy cottages, gardens, streams, villages and rural churches.” (Jacobs).

ix  In Poe’s Narrative , the Tsalalians, the residents of the dusky tropical island, cry “ Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! ” in terror whenever they see a white object or being (195). In Johnson’s Pym , Chris utters the same terrified cry upon seeing his first Antarctic “humanoid” and subsequently learns from Pym that the creatures’ subterranean world is named “Tekeli-li” (96, 141).

x  Grady McWhiney writes, “Some Crackers were rich, others poor, and still others were neither; but they all more or less shared the same values. And that is the point: Cracker does not signify an economic condition; rather, it defines a culture” (xiv).

xi  Garth finds the artist using the Karvel print Shackleton’s Sorrow as his guide; the title further links Pym to the history of Antarctic exploration as Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led three expeditions to the region.

Electronic reference

Jennifer M. Wilks , ““Black Matters”: Race and Literary History in Mat Johnson’s Pym ” ,  European journal of American studies [Online], 11-1 | 2016, document 6, Online since 02 June 2016 , connection on 22 August 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11523; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11523

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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

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Part 1 summary: “black matters”.

Morrison expresses her desire to extend the study of American literature. Using the metaphor of a map, she writes that she wants to open this study to a “wider landscape” and cover a “critical geography” (3). She maintains that in her explorations, she will not function as a literary critic but instead as a writer. She is interested in examining the parts of a writer’s consciousness that remain out of touch to the writer. As a black woman, she also examines how free she and others can be in what she calls a “a highly and historically racialized society” (4).

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