Abstract
Throughout her body of work, Toni Morrison has been deeply engaged with the ethics and politics of visuality. Morrison’s interest in visual-ity stems from her desire to “bear witness to the plight of African Americans” (Bouson 2), a plight that Morrison has described as “grotesque” (Jones and Vinson 181) and in graphic description as “my people are being devoured” (Morrison, “Language Must Not Sweat” 121). There is a tension also between Morrison’s sense that the desperate situation of African Americans warrants immediate attention and the strange invisibility of racial issues in much of American culture. Morrison recognizes that a process of erasure and forgetting has rendered America’s racial past and its ongoing legacy largely invisible in American culture—though its effects remain keenly felt and impact the lives of contemporary Americans, both black and white. In Playing in the Dark, she indicts literature for its role in this process of erasure, suggesting that though “the major and championed characteristics of our national literature” are “responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” (5), “in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse” (9). She has also suggested that slave narratives played a role in this process of erasure, explaining that “over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too horrible to relate.’