
Playing in the Dark
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
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Narrated by:
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Bahni Turpin
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By:
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Toni Morrison
About this listen
An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner
Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable listen for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
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Critic reviews
"A profound redefinition of American cultural identity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." --Chicago Tribune
"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer." --The New York Times Book Review
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Overall
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- By Student on 01-02-20
By: Toni Morrison
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The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Amazing
- By psiegler on 07-25-18
By: Toni Morrison
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Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
- By John R Williford on 07-14-06
By: Toni Morrison
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The Souls of Black Folk
- By: W. E. B. Du Bois
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature. First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
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Essays of 'life and love and strife and failure'
- By ESK on 02-08-13
By: W. E. B. Du Bois
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Home
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
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not a novel, but a collection of short stories
- By Melinda on 06-14-12
By: Toni Morrison
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Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Desiree Coleman
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Notes of a Native Son
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
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The Son of Mr. Suleman
- A Novel
- By: Eric Jerome Dickey
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s the summer of 2019, and Professor Pi Suleman is a Black man from Memphis with a lot to endure - not only as a Black man in Trump’s America but in his hard-earned career as an adjunct professor. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague’s prejudices and microaggressions. At the same time, he’s being blackmailed by a powerful professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted her, when in fact the truth is just the opposite, trapping him in a he-said-she-said with a white woman that, in this society, Pi knows he will never win.
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He Went Home
- By alec on 05-02-21
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The Fire Next Time
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Jesse L. Martin
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.
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Sad and moving and powerful and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 09-17-15
By: James Baldwin
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The Message
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind.
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Bias
- By Dana on 10-13-24
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
What listeners say about Playing in the Dark
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- keishie23
- 05-13-20
My goodness..get ready to be challenged
I enjoyed this book very much, I must say it caught me off guard. It will definitely impact on how you interpret literature and it’s effects. Turpin’s narration is superb. ❤️
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- Anonymous User
- 03-28-21
Being able to see in the darkness
Toni Morrison’s discussion of the Africanist presence in American literature is particularly eye opening, providing fodder for meaningful conversations about the impact of the Africanist presence in all aspects of culture and politics.
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- Brittany
- 01-21-24
The words to describe the black authors dilemma
I always wondered the role literature played in reinforcing the American view of black people but i couldn’t quite put my words on it. I knew of the stereotypes and tropes and half hearted humanizations but i still didn’t really know how to say it. Im grateful for Toni putting it into words so i could know what lie before me as an author of American literature. Ive read this several times now because its is a dense but impactful little volume that pack a whole lotta understanding and perspective into very few pages
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- Matthew
- 09-09-20
Good ideas, incomprehensible delivery
I respect her writing ability and her articulacy, but there comes a point when you have to keep the reader in mind. This is especially true when an author is trying to express to the reader a political viewpoint. Otherwise, no lasting effect is left on the reader. This book expresses something meaningful, and at many times agreeable. However, Morrison seems to prefer to use word salad and pompous, over-intellectualized, incomprehensible dribble. Most of the statements made in this 3 hour or so lecture are basically Chinese to a person who only knows English. If your up for re-reading every sentence 3 times over, pick this book up. You might like it. If you're White and fragile, you'll hate it.
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2 people found this helpful