IN Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison has argued that Africanism is essential to the definition of Americanness and American modernity, as well as to the major themes and presumptions of the white North American literary imagination. In particular, she believes that the white literary imagination has been the ideological site of “the manipulation of the Africanist narrative (that is, the story of a black person, the experience of being bound and/or rejected) as a means of meditation — both safe and risky — on one's own humanity” (Morrison, Playing 53). Morrison calls for literary and cultural inquiries into “[h]ow the representation and appropriation of that narrative provides opportunities to contemplate limitation, suffering, rebellion, and to speculate on fate and destiny” in white North American literature. Criticism of this kind, she believes, “will show how that narrative is used in the construction of a history and a context for whites by positing historylessness and context-lessness for blacks” (Morrison, Playing 53).

In part, at least, such literary criticism is no stranger to Faulkner studies in general, and to Go Down, Moses in particular. Thadious M. Davis, in Faulkner's “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context, has explored the workings and reflections of racial stereotype in Faulkner and the symbolic valence of “Negro” for the southern writer who wishes to convey concepts such as “slavery, sexuality, primitivism, fraternity, endurance, hope,” and historical contexts such as the antebellum South, metaphors for change, or social issues and problems (T. M. Davis 26–27).