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The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century

Marc C. Conner and Lucas E. Morel

in The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century

This introduction situates Ellison’s writings in the context of new approaches and abiding interest in his work; explores the affinity between Ralph Ellison’s fiction and commentary and Barack ... More

This introduction situates Ellison’s writings in the context of new approaches and abiding interest in his work; explores the affinity between Ralph Ellison’s fiction and commentary and Barack Obama’s political and literary sensibilities; and gives brief summaries of the fourteen original essays that examine the unpublished novel-in-progress, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . , Ellison’s landmark novel Invisible Man, and Ellison’s political, cultural, and historical significance for the 21st century.Less

Visible Decisions: Irony, Law, and the Political Constitution of Ralph Ellison

Matthew Stratton

in The Politics of Irony in American Modernism

This chapter examines the ways in which discourses around irony intersect with discourses of law, race, responsibility, and recognition in the period that saw the institutionalization of both ... More

This chapter examines the ways in which discourses around irony intersect with discourses of law, race, responsibility, and recognition in the period that saw the institutionalization of both modernism and the New Criticism. Legal and literary history, political theory, and formalist close reading help reframe the ways that Ralph Ellison consistently invoked what he called a “gyroscope of irony” to frame the political reception of his only finished novel. Ellison enacts and expands irony as theorized by his friend Kenneth Burke to form particular dispositions toward information and thus to valorize agonistic disagreement as the means by which just decisions are reached in a democracy. Against attacks on the novel and on Ellison himself as retreating from political engagement, this chapter argues that Invisible Man redefines and undermines definitions of irony, and thereby definitions of politics that are limited either to direct action or to legislative formalism.Less

Alternative Readings of Bigger Thomas

Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh

in The Politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on Resistance

Bigger Thomas, one of Richard Wright’s most memorable and distinctive fictional creations, has been interpreted in vastly different ways. This is partly because readers bring to Native Son different ... More

Bigger Thomas, one of Richard Wright’s most memorable and distinctive fictional creations, has been interpreted in vastly different ways. This is partly because readers bring to Native Son different sets of beliefs about US capitalism, about the psychology of US racism, about the spiritual resources of black communities, and about the commitments and priorities of the United States government. This chapter, by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, compares how Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright interpreted Bigger’s story. The comparison reminds us of the variety of political projects to which the story can be put to use, and the possible futures for the United States—from working-class fascism, to state-led progressivism, to black communalism, to interracial fantasies and nightmares—that Bigger’s tale can illuminate.Less

Ralph Ellison and the Grain of Internationalism

Brent Hayes Edwards

in Globalizing American Studies

Thinking about Ralph Ellison as an internationalist requires tinkering with some of most closely guarded assumptions about his work. “America” is what a linguist would call an unmarked term: whereas ... More

Thinking about Ralph Ellison as an internationalist requires tinkering with some of most closely guarded assumptions about his work. “America” is what a linguist would call an unmarked term: whereas most of the other key notions invoked in the Ellison corpus are fingered and pressed into rich, changing threads of significance, “America” sometimes seems to remain untroubled, conjured unquestioningly as the self-evident boundary of inquiry. There is a surprising wealth of material on internationalism in Ellison's extensive drafts for the editorials in the Negro Quarterly between 1942 and 1944. Internationalism is not a discourse. The word “grain” indicates a temporized stratification, a mode of formal organization that one might term institutional, predicated on a certain founding interpretive violence, and even a quality of consciousness. The point is that the politics of radical internationalism remains a problem in Ellison's fictional architecture—a “grain” both in the sense of a structuring feature and in the sense of a concern continually being put to the test.Less

Conclusion: Beyond Du Bois: Toward a Tradition of African American Pragmatic Religious Naturalism

Jonathon S. Kahn

in Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois

This concluding chapter begins to look beyond Du Bois for a larger tradition of African American pragmatic religious naturalism. Du Bois inaugurates this tradition, and this chapter argues that it ... More

This concluding chapter begins to look beyond Du Bois for a larger tradition of African American pragmatic religious naturalism. Du Bois inaugurates this tradition, and this chapter argues that it continues in figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Using Albert Murray's work, the chapter understands African American pragmatic religious naturalism as a form of blues improvization where mimicking traditional forms of African American religion leads to flights of novel inspiration. The focus of this chapter is on a scene from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which Ellison uses religion to unsettle racial essentialisms. Ironically, Ellison turns religion into a source for indeterminacy and ambivalence that strengthen a pragmatic confrontation with racial terms of existence.Less

“The President Has Asked Me”: Faulkner, Ellison, and Public Intellectualism

Joseph Fruscione and Jay Watson

in Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas

This chapter discusses how Ralph Ellison actively dealt with Faulkner’s influence on his work and public image. Ellison valued Faulkner both as a racially attuned novelist and as a publicly active ... More

This chapter discusses how Ralph Ellison actively dealt with Faulkner’s influence on his work and public image. Ellison valued Faulkner both as a racially attuned novelist and as a publicly active critic refining his intellect throughout the civil rights era. Ellison’s connection with Faulkner was partly direct, partly indirect: there was shared correspondence, at least two brief meetings, and a lot of reading and writing on Ellison’s part. The chapter examines two related threads: (1) the authors’ exchange of letters in 1956–57 about the White House’s People-to-People Program; (2) Ellison’s interest in Faulkner as literary model and racial critic. Throughout his career as novelist, essayist, and educator, Ellison “had accepted the challenge of William Faulkner’s complex literary image of the South,” in Albert Murray’s words, as his writings and archival documents spanning forty-odd years indicate.Less

Black Is, Black Ain't: Violence, Black Masculinity, and the Novel as Democratic Symbol

in The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism

This chapter explores Ralph Ellison's use of violence and the mixture of private ironies and public hopes, race, and masculinity in the short story “Flying Home.” This early story introduced themes ... More

This chapter explores Ralph Ellison's use of violence and the mixture of private ironies and public hopes, race, and masculinity in the short story “Flying Home.” This early story introduced themes of masculine violence and tragicomedy that Ellison subsequently improvised upon and polished in Invisible Man. “Flying Home” presents Ellison's theory of African American psychology. Invisible Man is framed by the protagonist's passage through acts of ritualized violence, beginning with pugilistic confrontation and ending with castration. It describes both the violence on the route to identity and on the route to literary efficacy. It then argues that Ellison eschewed traditional linearity in Juneteenth in favor of an exploded form that conveyed the contingency of narrative forms and a holistic literary attitude.Less

The Mystery of American Identity: Ralph Ellison

Cheryl A. Wall

in On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay

Although best known for his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s essays, and the array of cultural and political agendas which prompt their conception, are integral to American literary theory and ... More

Although best known for his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s essays, and the array of cultural and political agendas which prompt their conception, are integral to American literary theory and criticism. His essays defined the terms for ongoing debates around nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction, modernist aesthetics, and American culture. This chapter charts the various cultural, literary, and political interventions made by Ellison’s essays. Like James Baldwin (chapter 4), Ellison confronts the question of American identity, but he recasts it in terms of culture rather than of the individual. Through Ellison’s use of the vernacular process, which blends high and low styles, he maps cultural concerns onto the political stage. By emphasizing the cultural contributions made by African Americans, Ellison’s work complicates, reworks, and redefines our understanding of American culture.Less

Asylums

David J. Alworth

in Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form

This chapter considers Ralph Ellison's career-long interest in asylums—sites where “individuals” are, as Goffman writes, “cut off from the wider society”—suggests a new way of defining his ... More

This chapter considers Ralph Ellison's career-long interest in asylums—sites where “individuals” are, as Goffman writes, “cut off from the wider society”—suggests a new way of defining his relationship to the discipline of sociology. Ellison's treatment of asylums reveals his affinity with sociologist Erving Goffman, whose own writing on such sites still stands among the most influential. The chapter tracks the overlap in their respective approaches to this site in order to develop a new sense of Ellison's sociological imagination: his attempt to apprehend social reality through an engagement with a particular locale. It situates Ellison's writings on the asylum within an intellectual and cultural history that contains Goffman. The chapter concludes by adapting some of the sociologist's key concepts in an effort to rethink the invisible man's “hole,” his distinctive underground lair, itself an asylum and quite possibly the most beguiling site in all of American literature.Less

Accidents Going Somewhere to Happen: African-American Self-Definition at Mid-Century

Steven Belletto

in No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, ... More

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.Less

Basement: Ralph Ellison

Marta Figlerowicz

in Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison’s novel takes its political edge from turning the tables on experiences of interpersonal affective disempowerment of the kind that ... More

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison’s novel takes its political edge from turning the tables on experiences of interpersonal affective disempowerment of the kind that Baldwin’s and Proust’s characters intensely fear. Its narrator begins by trying, much like the protagonists of Woolf’s and Fitzgerald’s fiction, to look to the people and objects around him for confirmations and clarifications of how he feels, and how historically and socially important his feelings are. Yet he eventually realizes that the social structures he opposes are disrupted much more effectively by destabilizing other people’s affective awareness, and showing them how much this awareness depends on his cooperation. The basement offers this narrator a model of such an absorptive but not readily responsive attitude toward others, whose critical importance the chapter highlights by engaging with the work of Lauren Berlant.Less

Introduction

Michael Germana

in Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

This introductory chapter traces the origins of Ralph Ellison’s philosophy of temporality, and illustrates how Ellison’s synthesis of the ideas of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche precedes, and ... More

This introductory chapter traces the origins of Ralph Ellison’s philosophy of temporality, and illustrates how Ellison’s synthesis of the ideas of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche precedes, and in many ways prefigures, the work of Gilles Deleuze. It also demonstrates how Ellison’s Bergsonian critique of spatialized time—a coercive form of temporality that subtends progressive history—anticipates contemporary post-Deleuzian elucidations of the reciprocal relationship between temporality and subjectivity. By attuning his readers to intensities implicit in the present, or the dynamism inherent in what Bergson called duration, Ellison affirms the open-endedness of the future while critiquing all forms of determinism. And by treating race as a matter of time, Ellison shows how the feedback loops by which a racist society chaotically reproduces itself can be destabilized by troubling the coercive temporality with which they are linked “on the lower frequencies” of our immanent existence.Less

The Souls of Black Folk: Ralph Ellison’s Tragicomic Portrait

Alejandro Nava

in In Search of Soul: Hip-Hop, Literature, and Religion

This chapter explores some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions through Ralph Ellison's depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, this chapter ... More

This chapter explores some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions through Ralph Ellison's depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, this chapter falls in the thick of musical and cultural currents of soul. Like many black writers of the twentieth century, Ellison brought musical cadences and flows into the mighty river of American literature, injecting some of its stagnant waters with a fresh tributary of style. By adding his lyrical voice to American literature, he used his pen the way black musicians used their instruments, making it sing on behalf of a black American experience that was invisible in many parts of America. He not only honored conceptions of soul in black music, folklore, literature, and religion in this way, but also simultaneously exposed the blindness and tone deafness of many Americans.Less

“We Used to Say ‘Stashed’ ”: Romare Bearden Paints the Blues

Robert G. O’Meally

in The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art

This chapter discusses Romare Bearden, who acknowledged jazz as a formal influence and produced numerous collages on jazz- and blues-related topics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This discussion of ... More

This chapter discusses Romare Bearden, who acknowledged jazz as a formal influence and produced numerous collages on jazz- and blues-related topics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This discussion of Bearden's art as reflective of a jazz culture, even when his subject matter makes no reference to jazz, draws on the insights of the painter's two most sympathetic interpreters—Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray—and includes a reminiscence of Bearden–Murray “jam sessions” in a Manhattan bookshop. After a review of Bearden's most incisive commentators—Murray and Ellison—the discussion considers his process of jamming the blues with other artists and the blues painter as swinging collaborator in the jazz mode.Less

“Life Upon the Horns of the White Man’s Dilemma”: Ralph Ellison, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Project of National Therapy

Stephen Schryer

in Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison's critique of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. Ellison rejected Myrdal's claim that black culture and psychology can be viewed as pathological by-products of ... More

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison's critique of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. Ellison rejected Myrdal's claim that black culture and psychology can be viewed as pathological by-products of white racism, and criticized the impact of sociology on naturalistic representations of race, questioning if “American Negroes are simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” Kenneth Warren praised Ellison's argument saying that he “was seeking a dynamic, even dialectical account of the Negro that would acknowledge the history of racial repression but not characterize black people as merely prisoners of a repressive environment.” Andrew Hoberek similarly highlights the extent to which Ellison echoed a version of postwar sociology concerned with issues of class rather than with issues of race.Less

A Place Apart: The “New Ghetto” and the “Old Neighborhood”

Benjamin Looker

in A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

Amid mounting public concern over the nation's simmering “urban crisis,” journalists, social scientists, and critics struggled to determine the relevance of received notions of neighborhood functions ... More

Amid mounting public concern over the nation's simmering “urban crisis,” journalists, social scientists, and critics struggled to determine the relevance of received notions of neighborhood functions and values to the 1960s central cities. Tracing this debate in social-scientific scholarship and popular criticism, chapter 5 demonstrates how liberal critics resurrected older romantic stories about the white immigrant enclave as a way to diagnose the problems afflicting black inner-city residential communities. Yet the sharp contrast drawn here between the “old neighborhood” and the “new ghetto,” this chapter demonstrates, relied upon the erasure of African-American neighborhood cultures and loyalties. In response, intellectuals such as Carol Stack and Ralph Ellison sought to reincorporate black city districts into a wider neighborhood narrative, even as their work itself became subject to appropriation by conservatives.Less

(Re)Viewing Ellison’s Invisible Man: Comedy, Rage, and Cultural Tradition in an African American Classic

Terrence T. Tucker

in Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a foundational work in the development of comic rage, particularly through its use of black folk tradition. Ellison’s use of the tradition of ... More

This chapter examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a foundational work in the development of comic rage, particularly through its use of black folk tradition. Ellison’s use of the tradition of black folk humor on both literal and cultural targets manifests itself in extensive acts of signifying. In particular, the novel critiques black protest novels of the 1940s and 1950s—embodied by Richard Wright’s Native Son—with the use of humor and other forms of African American cultural expressions. This chapter explores how, while the novel contains as much rage and violence as the protest novels do in their critique of racist oppression, Ellison’s novel avoids allowing the rage to become destructive by highlighting the rhetorical skill of the protagonist and the embrace of jazz as a critical aesthetic. The book lays the groundwork for other works of comic rage both within and outside the African American literary tradition.Less

A Deep Pocket for the Truth of the Times: Ellison’s Other Groove of History

Michael Germana

in Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a ... More

Chapter 5 treats Ellison’s music criticism as an expression of his commitment to durational time and a critique of cultural forms like bebop that, in Ellison’s estimation, lend form to a discontinuous present. Rather than suggest, as many critics have, that Ellison was simply nostalgic for danceable swing music or hostile toward emerging musical forms, this chapter shows that Ellison’s primary criticism of bebop is that it formalizes a discontinuous sense of time and thereby affirms an historical view of the past structured by an analogous, sequentially static sense of time. Ellison’s problem with bebop, in other words, is neither musicological nor sociological, but temporal. Folk jazz and the blues, by contrast, affirm a durational view of time in the form of a “pocket” or groove entirely unlike the spatialized groove of history described in Invisible Man. In short, Ellison finds in musical grooves antidotes to the groove of history.Less