Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page

Abstract

The problem, for us, can perhaps be usefully stated in the irony implicit in the attempt to posit a 'black self in the very Western languages in which blackness itself is a figure of absence, a negation. Ethnocentrism and 'logocentrism' are profoundly interrelated in Western discourse as old as the Phaedrus of Plato, in which one finds one of the earliest figures of blackness as an absence, a figure of negation. -Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (7)