Preface Summary and Analysis

Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" is a collection of three essays written concerning race in American literature. Morrison explores the ways that literary whiteness and literary blackness are constructed in American literature as well as the ways in which this affects American literature as a whole. "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" explores the means by which the Africanist presence is used in American literature by different authors.

Persuaded by the title, Toni Morrison reads Marie Cardinal's "The Words to Say It" in 1983. The book is a document of the author's madness, therapy and healing. Morrison is skeptical of the book's classification as an autobiographical novel but finds the label to be accurate. She wonders when precisely Cardinal knew she was in trouble. Forty pages into the book "the Thing" that occurs...