Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Of the many social faultlines exposed and deepened by the current crisis, race stands out for its power to attract blame. The US is seeing a spate of hate crimes against Asian Americans , encouraged by a blame-China campaign by Trump and his allies. Singapore, which has long shunted its South Asian migrant workers into crowded dormitories, is caught unprepared for a surge in coronavirus infection among this vulnerable population. Actions taken to address this surge have been slow and confusing, even dangerous. A migrant rights advocacy group discovered that a group of migrant workers were locked up in their room by their dormitory operator. This is horrifying but not surprising, given the country's racialized fear of an exploited and silenced population.  In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , Toni Morrison argues that the American ideal of freedom is not formed by the...

In these lectures-turned-essays, Toni Morrison provides a very suggestive approach to the critical study of classic American literature. Arguing that literary whiteness is constituted against literary blackness—freedom against slavery, innocence against experience, civilization against savagery—she calls for the study of what she names as Africanism in literature produced by white writers. This is not so much for the purpose of critical subversion or ideological rallying as for the richer, more complex, and more nuanced study of American literature. She demonstrates this approach in brief analyses of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl , Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn , and Hemingway's novels. I wish she had more room, in either the lecture series or the book publication, to deploy the approach to the works of Thoreau and Henry James, both reckoned to be American masters. The comment on Melville's Moby Di...