What I'm Reading #20

"Playing in the Dark" is a rather dense and brilliant little monograph from Nobel Prize laureate, Toni Morrison. In it she seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that the American literary tradition was born from an Anglo-American root that was pure and unaffected by "Africanist" influences. She does this by exploring the archetypal motifs of American literature not as unique ideas formed by a unique people, but as painfully and powerfully conceived out of an essential, psychologically entwined relationship with this nation's profound African heritage. Not an easy read, but a wonderfully satisfying one.