Toni Morrison’s Struggle to Find an Identity

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination morrison rejects the theory that American literature reflects white male views. She argues that "Africanism", a term she uses "for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify" (morrison, Playing, 6), has had a crucial presence in American literature throughout the years. morrison writes, "These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature -individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with death and hell -are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence."(morrison, Playing, 5)