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"I feel most white when I am thrown against a sharp black background.”
This statement, an inversion of Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background”, seems to fit Toni Morrison’s analysis in her essential work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In it Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, writes of the concluding scene of canonical white US writer Edgar Allen Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, wherein the death of a black character is followed by the apparition of a “blinding ... closed and unknowable white form”.
Morrison explains: “These images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness – a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of US literature with fear and longing.”
