I did have a serious thought to read Toni Morrison's fictions, The Bluest Eye or Beloved in the U.K. but somehow discouraged by a friend. I frequently visited the nearest Blackwell which is located between Grovensor Palce (my dorm) and Man. Uni main campus. Because of its reader-friendly location, it was almost impossible to resist the tempation to take a break or visit in W. H. Smith. Morrison's fictions usually caught my eyes whenever I looked around in the fiction section because, by alphabetical order and chance, her books were shelved slightly below the eye level which made it too easy to be noticed.
Last week, I came across her writing, not from fiction but an academic paper on Legal Orientalism, on Africanism as follows:
"Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but the progressive fulfillment of destiny." (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), p. 52)
Note: Currently also reading Zhang Longxi's "The Myth of the Other" (1988).
