Playing in the Dark and the Ghosts in the Machine

Set in Indonesia in 1965, Peter Weir’s film, The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) depicted “a love caught in the fire of revolution,” according to its tag line. The literal “fire” was supplied by re-enactments of PKI demonstrations against US imperialism while the metaphorical fire, and the one that admittedly held my interest then, was the one that smoldered between Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson playing Western expats. Their romance was altogether satisfactory to me in 1983 and no doubt also to an audience yet untroubled by questions about Gibson’s sanity. He was pretty then, and so was she. That their characters were surrounded by smaller, browner people who seemed to have equally urgent, though intentionally more nebulous desires seemed less to the point. I was therefore caught up short by my sister’s dismissive comment afterward: “He’s in a country full of Asian women and he falls for the only white woman for miles around.”

I did not begrudge Mel Gibson his object choice; even though I was an Asian woman it did not occur to me to watch the movie as one. However much this brief review sounded as if it came from the pages of Tiger Beat Magazine, it “ruined” the experience. What did race have to do with it? My sister’s throw-away assessment forced the backdrop into the foreground, eroding my innocent belief in the shared universality of perspective, no less my own ability to assume it.

The inability of American literary criticism to retreat to a similar place of racial innocence owes a tremendous debt to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). The slim volume both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which disavowing race’s relevance to the American canon could no longer serve as a proper alibi. In teasing out the “Africanist presence” in authors such as Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ernest Hemingway, Morrison makes a stunning case for the significance of African-American characters and tropes to American literature. Whether the “thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy” instigates feelings of love or dread, one cannot ignore the way that it infuses the US collective imaginary (13). “As a writer reading,” she notes, “I came to realize the obvious”:

the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity.

(17)

Who among us has not quoted this line, asking Morrison to ventriloquize our awareness of the dialectical interplay of power intrinsic to subject formation? And who among us could say it better? In these essays, the seemingly marginal, often metaphorical darkness assumes its rightful place as constitutive not merely of the normative invisibility of white characters, but of national character itself. “[T]he image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness,” Morrison asserts, assumes a weighty, yet veiled charge: that of forming, in relief, “the distinguishing characteristics of a proto-American literature” (39). Her ability to read race everywhere when it is seemingly nowhere established its relevance to the cultural work of nationalism: “Even when American texts are not ‘about’ Africanist presences, or characters or narrative or idiom, the shadow hovers in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation” (45). Tracing “the shadow” offered critics a potent methodology; as Shelley Fisher Fishkin noted, the book succeeded in “mapping a new critical geography” (629). Smaller, browner people could no longer be taken for simple backdrops showcasing the magnificent humanity of white people because they created the very conditions of its articulation. Playing in the Dark represented a symbolic milestone for those of us who looked to someone with unimpeachable credentials to legitimate our own less eloquently expressed but nonetheless longstanding conviction that the whiteness of the whale was never simply...