Study questions for Playing in the Dark       

1.  What is the metaphor of the fishbowl (page 47)?  What is being discussed here?

2. What is the Africanist presence?  How can we compare it to the “absent presence” of the Jews in the English imagination after the expulsion of 1290? 

3.  How does gender figure in to Morrison’s argument?  On page 14 she sees an “instructive parallel” in considering gender.  What is this parallel?  How does gender figure into her discussion of Hemingway in Chapter 3?

3.  Why, according to Morrison, does Cather’s novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, fail? 

4.  Morrison argues that she is exploring the construction of “whiteness” in the literary imagination of white American authors.  What is the impact of shifting from the typical emphasis of analysis from a focus on “blackness” and representations of African-American characters to a focus on the creation of “whiteness”? 

5.  On page 63, Morrison argues that “Race is metaphorical.”  What does she mean by this?  What are the implications of her assertion in general?  For the issues we have been examining?

 

A citation related to the Spanish blood laws

A frequently cited passage from early modern Spanish author Fray Prudencio de Sandoval fdescribes the spiritual intractability of Jews as a type of essence that is similar to blackness of skin color, asserting that both are traits passed on through generations, even if mixed with white or Christian ancestry:
Who can deny that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in Negroes [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness:  For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the dark color of the father.  Similarly, it is not enough for the Jew to be three parts aristocrat or Old Christian for one family line [...] alone defiles and corrupts him.    (1604)
Such writings suggest that no matter what one’s outer appearance is, essential difference may lurk in the blood, beneath the skin.  A Jew may have eyes, and may bleed when pricked, but that blood itself may be essentially different from Christian blood. 

¿ Mas quién podrá negar que en los descendientes de judíos permanece y dura la mala inclinación de su antigua ingratitud y mal conocimiento, como en los negros el accidente inseparable du su negrura? Que si bien mil veces se juntan con mujeres blancas, los hijos nacen con el color moreno de sus padres.  Así al judio no le basta [ser] por tres partes hidalgo, o cristiano viejo, que sola una raza lo inficiona y daña, para ser en sus hechos, de todas maneras, judíos dañosos por extremo en las comunidades.  Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechoes del emperator Carlos V. vol 82 Biblioteca de autores españoles. (Madrid: Editiones Atlas, 1956), 319.   English translation from Friedman, 17, who translates “raza” as “bloodline,” although, as Dara Goldman noted to me, the word is interesting for its connections to the emerging conceptions of “race” that we are examining. 


. ¿ Mas quién podrá negar que en los descendientes de judíos permanece y dura la mala inclinación de su antigua ingratitud y mal conocimiento, como en los negros el accidente inseparable du su negrura? Que si bien mil veces se juntan con mujeres blancas, los hijos nacen con el color moreno de sus padres.  Así al judio no le basta [ser] por tres partes hidalgo, o cristiano viejo, que sola una raza lo inficiona y daña, para ser en sus hechos, de todas maneras, judíos dañosos por extremo en las comunidades.  Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechoes del emperator Carlos V. vol 82 Biblioteca de autores españoles. (Madrid: Editiones Atlas, 1956), 319.   English translation from Friedman, 17, who translates “raza” as “bloodline,” although, as Dara Goldman noted to me, the word is interesting for its connections to the emerging conceptions of “race” that we are examining.  Also cited in Loomba, 208 and Metzger, 55.  Loomba links essence to interiority, 208.