
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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- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
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Maybe a beautiful story, This author should never narrate
- By Student on 01-02-20
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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A Mercy
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
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Great book
- By Pablo Tebas on 01-18-09
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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How to Be an Antiracist
- By: Ibram X. Kendi
- Narrated by: Ibram X. Kendi
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves—now updated, with a new preface.
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80% of the useful content is in the first 1-2 chapters
- By Anonymous User on 03-09-20
By: Ibram X. Kendi
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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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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 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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One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
By: Gabriel García Márquez, and others
My goodness..get ready to be challenged
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Being able to see in the darkness
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The words to describe the black authors dilemma
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Good ideas, incomprehensible delivery
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