With her famous collection of essays, “Playing in the Dark,” author and first Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison laid a milestone in critical racism studies and academic “Studies of Critical Whiteness.”
The volume contains the three essays “Black Matters,” “Swarming from the Shadows,” and “Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks.” In these, Morrison engages with classics of white U.S. literature and examines how and to what extent black people are represented. She finally states the “racial question” as a metaphor. Using these, white authors constructed their selves and established racialized subject positions, simultaneously retreating to an unmarked and uninvolved situation-both in relation to economic inequalities and personal anxieties.
The edition has been translated from English into German, resulting in partial distortion and misinterpretation of the content. Also, the terms “race” and “racial” have been translated by “race” and “racial,” which incorrectly equates the English meaning of critical categories of analysis with terms of biological order.
Toni Morrison 1995: Playing in the Dark. White Culture and the Literary Imagination. Reinbek: Rowohlt.
If you don’t have a bookstore worth supporting near you, you can also buy the book from the alternative non-profit online bookstore links-lesen.de, which supports political projects with the profits. The link to the book is: http: //www.links-lesen.de/article/978-3-499-13754-9