Othering Whiteness – A Reading of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“Othering” provides important perspectives in postcolonial and race studies wherein the dominant group “others” the marginal group by creating negative discourses about the latter. The literary scene of the U. S. has many examples where white writers other the black characters in their works. The literary canon again others the black writers by presenting them not within the mainstream – not as Americans – but as African Americans. Blackness, therefore, has constantly been othered in the American social and literary scene. Black writers and critics have now retaliated by counter othering whiteness in their works. Toni Morrison in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination seeks to critically examine “whiteness” in American literary tradition. This paper seeks to show how her criticism engages in a Manichean discourse of blackness and whiteness and fails to be inclusive. Her work follows the tradition of African American critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and bell hooks, which, according to her detractors, is overtly propagandist and one-dimensional, with little space for dialectics. In so doing, she fails to dismantle the hierarchies altogether that she condemns and ends up creating new hierarchies, which are also problematic.