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Nostalgia. History. Punctuation? Yes. Punctuation-ubiquitous, understudied, unconscious, undone, present, presentational, peripatetic, imported, important.
-Jennifer DeVere Brody1
In texts where racial categories are elusive or ambiguous, the space between the binary becomes open terrain for unpacking race as a trope in American literature. "Recitatif," Toni Morrison's first and only short story, is one such text. "Recitatif," so named for a recitative style of vocal performance that advances the action of, say, an opera in much the same way that dialogue advances the action of a play,2 Morrison charts the adult lives of Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk-two women brought together as eight-year-old girls at the St. Bonaventure orphanage-and dramatizes their periodic and serendipitous interactions during some twenty years after they first meet. By selectively identifying one woman as white and the other as black, Morrison paints race as a salient feature of the narrative. By resisting the impulse to reveal which woman identifies with which race, however, Morrison challenges the ways writers rely on stereotypical racial codes to describe their characters, compelling readers to interrogate their own suppositions about racial signifiers.3
Race has been, and quite possibly always will be, as central to American literature as narratives of contact and conquest, self-reliance and self-fashioning, modernism and multiculturalism. The conflict that was at one time among the Spanish, French, and Native Americans was quickly supplanted by tensions between white colonists and black Africans. As inadequate as the "black-white nexus" is to capturing the complexities of America's multiracial past,4 the United States government has traditionally drawn lines of full citizenship along this binary, regulating educational access, marriage rights, and political enfranchisement based upon skin color.5 What resulted was the practice of categorizing persons according to race. The racial signs and symbols permeating much of early American writing morphed, later, into tropes of blackness where dark skin (or simply a dark presence) represents the racial anxieties of white America. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison probes how a dark or "Africanist" presence "ignite[s] critical moments of discovery or change in literature" written by those who are not black.6 If, as Morrison suggests, the presence of a black body signals a moment of psychological or spiritual awakening for nonblack characters in texts crafted by...