hall catherine on toni morrison

Responses to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark

Photo ©: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Playing in the Dark … and racing Englishness

Catherine HallUniversity College London, UK

Playing in the Dark is a book that will always stay with me. I was a devoted reader of Tony Morrison by the time it was published in Britain in 1992 – profoundly moved by Beloved, deeply affected by The Bluest Eye and the Song of Solomon, ready to read any-thing that this remarkable writer on African-American experiences, histories and pres-ences wrote. But Playing in the Dark was a bit different. It wasn’t just inspiring, it spoke

Corresponding author:Catherine Hall, Department of History, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.Email: [email protected]

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very directly to me about my discipline, history and the ways that it might be possible to rethink how British historians have encoded and evaded the issue of race. This was not Morrison’s subject – but her reflections on the canon of American literature helped to open my eyes to new ways of thinking about British history writing.

Morrison addresses how, as a black woman writer, she has had to struggle with and through a ‘language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial supe-riority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive “othering” of people and language’ (Morrison, 1992: xii). Until very recently, she argues, American fiction has positioned its readers as white. She wanted to investigate, ‘what that assumption has meant to the literary imagi-nation’. ‘How do embedded assumptions of racial language work?’, she asks, in a liter-ary enterprise that likes to think of itself as humanistic (pp. xii–xiv). The orthodoxy had always been that canonical American literature was unaffected by the African-American presence. After collecting many examples of ‘the associative language of dread and love that accompanies blackness’ (p. xii), together with the tremors that erupted around ques-tions of race, she began to speculate whether the major characteristics of American litera-ture were responses to the ‘dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence’ (p. 5). ‘In matters of race’, she argues, ‘silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse’ (p. 9). She came to realize that ‘a real or fabricated Africanist presence’ was crucial to American identity – and that it showed (p. 6). National literatures, she suggests, ‘end up describing and inscribing what is on the national mind’ and the most important thing on the American mind was ‘the architecture of a new white man’ (pp. 14–15). American literature was shaped by the encounter with racial ideology, with what Melville named ‘the power of blackness’. ‘For in that construction of blackness and enslavement’, as she puts it, ‘could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me’ (p. 38). Morrison’s Playing in the Dark focused on the analysis of a series of canonical texts by Willa Cather, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe among others, explored the parasitical nature of white freedom – a project which has now been richly supplemented by her most recent novel, A Mercy, which imaginatively reconstructs the differentiated unfreedoms of all those engaged in the making of the new world of the American colonies – the prisons that colonizers made for themselves in their terrible exercise of power over those they sought to subject, and the constraints that surrounded the struggles for freedom.

Playing in the Dark was published at a time when I, like many other white feminists deeply shaken by black feminist critiques of our practices, was preoccupied with trying to grasp my own investment in the power of my normative whiteness. How had it been naturalized to the point that it was possible to be so unaware of its codes and embodi-ments? How had white femininities and white feminisms been shaped not only by gender and class relations, the power of which we had been systematically attempting to uncover, but also by ethnicity and race? The effect of this on my work as a feminist historian was that I turned to postcolonial theory and to questions of race and empire. I tried to inves-tigate the formation of 19th-century Englishness as a raced as well as gendered forma-tion. Empire, I came to think, was central to definitions of Englishness. Race might not have been lived inside, in the way it was in the US where slavery was endemic, but it was lived outside, through empire, and that outside was constitutive of the inside. For the English, and I use that term advisedly, the not-free were decidedly not-me. England and Englishness were characterized by freedom, liberty, the rights of the individual, the



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antithesis of which was slavery. The abolition of slavery was a key moment in the making of a white English identity that knew itself through its racial others, yet main-tained the fiction that those others could, in time, be English, ‘like us’.

Early to mid 19th-century liberal thinking on race started from the assumption that all human beings belonged to one family and that differences could be explained culturally, not biologically. It is this liberal formation, one that denies the significance of race and yet in practice operates with assumptions of a normative whiteness that is unreachable for ‘others’, that is at the centre of my current project – one to which Morrison’s work speaks directly. In their telling of the ‘national story’, English historians, whether Whig, Tory, or indeed Marxist, have ignored questions of race, seeing it as irrelevant to the domestic poli-tics of this ‘small island’. And national histories, like national literatures, both describe and inscribe what is on ‘the national mind’. England’s greatest national historian is Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England (really a history of Britain – named England), published between 1848 and 1861, was a best seller rivalling Dickens, has remained in print ever since and has profoundly influenced the national imaginary. Macaulay’s History focuses on the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, constructed as the cor-nerstone of modern English liberties with its balance of power between the crown and parliament, its commitment to the rule of law, the protection of property, freedom of the press and religious toleration. This was a story which envisioned England as the first modern nation, the one that others would follow. Macaulay himself was a key figure in the debates over the Reform Act of 1832 – the Act which enfranchised middle-class men, and in his view marked the next great moment of English progress, when ‘the people’ became part of the historic compromise. All this was enshrined in the ‘Whig interpretation of his-tory’, a fiction of progress, reform when necessary, the gradual inclusion of all sections of ‘the people’ in a steady movement forward, without violence or revolution.

Macaulay’s History focuses on the late 17th century. Yet it has nothing to say about the development of the slave trade and slavery, the Royal African Company, the expan-sion of London and its docks, the slave ships in Bristol, the merchants who made their fortunes in that trade and became key players in the new global financial markets. Nor about the sugar which gradually became part of the consumer revolution, bringing sweet-ness to those teas, coffees and chocolates which were arriving from the empire. Nor about the ways in which race was imagined in England – in written and visual culture, in the plays of Shakespeare or Aphra Behn, or the paintings of the enslaved serving the wealthy. Nor about the ways in which colonists in the West Indies constructed new legal codes that enshrined their freedom and rights to property and representative government, while at the same time denying others their rights to their own bodies and labour. The silence is striking. The history of England as Macaulay imagined it could be told outside of empire: the nation was self-determining, the logic of its development one of constitu-tionalism, a story of peaceful incorporation and assimilation, no irreconcilable class con-flict, no question of gender trouble, no racial tremors. This narrative, I suggest, was profoundly shaped by the ways in which abolition was understood. Macaulay’s father, Zachary, was a leading abolitionist – a key activist in the long struggle against the slave trade and slavery, a struggle which began in the 1780s and was partially completed in 1833 and 1838, when slavery and apprenticeship were abolished across most British ter-ritories. Abolitionists began to construct the history of that struggle from 1808, when the slave trade was abolished. They constructed it as the triumph of white humanitarians



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who had cleansed the nation of its sinful part in a terrible trade. Similarly, the ending of slavery was seen as a demonstration of the liberal and generous spirit of the British, pre-pared to contribute £20 million of taxpayers’ money to ensure freedom for enslaved Africans. Abolition cleansed the nation of any racial taint – race was no longer an issue for Britain – it was something that concerned those, especially in the US, who still main-tained the ‘peculiar institution’. Britain’s hands were clean. The empire was a reforming empire – one that refused slavery, saw peoples of colour as British subjects with rights to the rule of law, and believed, as Macaulay did, that one day, in the future, it might be possible for those imperial subjects to become ‘brown Englishmen’, enjoying the same liberties and freedoms as the English.

But Morrison’s ‘tremor’ is there, the slippages that speak, the ghosts that haunt, the spectres that disrupt. Macaulay’s History, of the triumphant creation of a free white nation, unconnected to its empire, attempted to banish the ‘mob’, the dissident and hungry Irish, the Indian sepoys who were to rise against the British in his lifetime. Race, he told himself and his readers, need not trouble the British. That work had been done, that problem belonged elsewhere, assimilation would provide the key to both nation and empire. Yet, as another part of him knew, there were only two ways to govern – by the sword or by public opinion. England, after reform, was governed by consent, while the empire was, had to be, held by the military. It was that knowledge which shadowed his narrative. Playing in the Dark threw some light on these processes for me – Morrison’s work on the US experience helps to dismantle the American canon and enables critics from other places and other disciplines to excavate their own questions of race and empire.

ReferencesMacaulay T Babington (1849–61) The History of England from the Accession of James II , 5 vols.

London: Longman Green. Morrison T (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

‘Writing my life with her words’

madeleine kennedy-macfoy University of Oslo, Norway

IntroductionI have loved books since I was a small child. My uncle Tunde often talks about how he marvelled at me as a five-year-old, living at my paternal grandparents’ house in Freetown, Sierra Leone. I would rush home from primary school, hastily remove my school uniform

Corresponding author:madeleine kennedy-macfoy, Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, PO Box 1040, Blindern, Oslo, Norway. Email: [email protected]



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