Ralph Ellison

In this article Annie Schultz argues that engaging with narratives of resistance and empow-erment in literary fiction makes for an important addition to the practice of political education. She is interested, in particular, in what can be gained from the thoughtful contemplation modeled by the inner monologues of literary narrators. Many writers of fiction have turned the inner lives of oppressed characters outward in order for readers to glimpse depictions of moral injustices that mirror those of the real world. Using Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man as an example of a literary representation of an existential journey to political consciousness, Schultz explores the imaginative implementation of literature in politically engaged pedagogy that, she argues, results in the development of conscious, articulate citizens.

Ralph Ellison's acclaimed novel and his sole masterpiece, Invisible Man, is said to have been one of the world's greatest African-American novels. It is replete with discussions of racial discrimination, identity crisis and studies of systematic (racial) exploitations. The depictions are coalesced with existential accounts of bodily sensations and struggles with the self and the society. Nevertheless, a more profound look at the context and deep structure of this novel can reveal its ideological and social critiques as well. In fact, Ellison had arguably acquired a well-versed knowledge regarding power-struggles within social systems prior to the development of this lengthy novel. Such issues, then, appear to be among the sidelights of this work. Ellison explores many political discussions of his predecessors and sometimes prophetically unearths many to-be-discovered issues and theories, years before their actual coinages by theoreticians and sociologists like Michel Foucault. With this hindsight, this article tries to study the novel's oblique or direct references to social ideologies, hegemonies, and the theory of Panopticism at stake.

Two great pieces of American literature from the past century stand in stark contrast to each other on one important note: vision. While F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" makes extensive use the symbol of eyes in its narrative, as well as the interpersonal relations of its characters and how they look at each other, Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" makes the lack of sight and recurrent blindness and invisibility a central and instructive theme. These works are each products of their time, and indeed products of class and race relations, however they speak to deeper, more fundamental forces in American culture. In using such accessible and salient themes in opposing ways, these two authors intentionally step back from their fictional narratives to give eloquent voice to the problems inherent in American ambitions and desires. A comparative analysis of the differing ways in which "The Great Gatsby" and "Invisible Man" explore the elemental sense of sight reveals that, unknowingly, but quite harmoniously, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison join hands across the decades to show us just how America lost—and perhaps continually loses—not only its sight, but also its vision.

This dissertation explores chthonic space in the work of Ralph Ellison. ‘Chthonic’ (from Ancient Greek χθών, ground, soil, earth) describes that which is ‘dwelling in or beneath the surface of the earth’. For Ellison, the chthonic is a site of contradiction and paradox in which binary oppositions break down. By reading the chthonic as both a recurrent allegory and organizing principle of his fiction, I approach Ellison's work through a "reading downward"—descending, like Dante, into the depths—as an alternative mode of engagement with his texts. Through analyzing the chthonic spaces in and of Invisible Man and Three Days Before the Shooting. . . I explore the tunnels connecting these texts while uprooting the critical emphasis on ‘progress’ and ‘completion’ germane to linear modes of reading. More importantly, the underground reveals Ellison engaging in a critique of categorical boundaries and limits which has common spirit with, and often anticipates, the critical project of Derridian thought, thus implying the potential contribution of deconstruction to an ongoing critique of the logic of racial segregation in American society.

I consider Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock," a controversial essay that positioned school desegregation in the American South as "abolish[ing] … both the teachers' and the parents' authority, replacing it with the rule of public opinion among children who have neither the ability nor the right to establish a public opinion of their own." Without dismissing Arendt's "Reflections," I argue that, even in higher education, strict boundaries subordinating "children" to adult authority risk marginalizing and silencing students within educational institutions and pedagogical scenes—particularly those students already marginalized along lines of race, gender, class, and so on. Drawing on Ralph Ellison's critique of "Reflections," Arendt's own "What Is Authority?", and recent scholarship on authority and agency, I ask how teachers might avoid abolishing or abdicating pedagogical authority while leaving (or making) room for students to respond to and question our authority as well as that of the broader institutions in which we work.

In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, the nameless African American protagonist , who has sought refuge from white supremacist society in a basement, narrates his life story and the insights he has had in self-imposed exile. Throughout the story, in which he symbolically lives through African American history after emancipation from slavery, Invisible Man struggles to find his identity, as he is socially invisible to the white majority society and other characters fail to perceive his individuality. Rejecting various political ideologies with which he was at one point affiliated, especially communism and black accommodationism, Invisible Man finds his identity by narrating the multiple subject positions he occupies to the reader, hoping that the reader will afford him the recognition he is denied in the story world. The novel is written in a modernist style that draws on black expressive culture such as jazz and the blues.

Assignment This critical writing assignment asks you to discuss any one or two of the texts on the syllabus. The topic is up to you to choose, though it is important that you do more than rehash class discussion. Given the length of the essay, you should focus on a topic that doesn't demand extensive background information, but instead allows you to make a clear, compelling thesis claim and support it with textual evidence efficiently.

Themes of fear and loathing are often associated with the narrative trajectory of the twentieth century  American  Bildungsroman. In the traditional European prototype,  coming-of-age is charted through the representation of ordeals and life lessons which the young protagonist or Bildungsheld must overcome in order to achieve their harmonious course of maturation. The American model forgoes this necessity of harmony. Ralph Ellison’s 'Invisible  Man' (1952) is one such coming-of-age narrative, following the pedagogical and experiential education of an African  American  adolescent  in  the  1920s  and  30s.  By  innovating  upon  several  of  the traditional  Bildungsroman  subgenres:  the  Künstlerroman  (development  of  the  artist  novel), and Erziehungsroman (novel of pedagogical e
ducation),  Ellison subverts  the inefficiencies of representing race in American literature and culture that had  come before  him. At the same time, the author illuminates the hypocrisies of racial and ideological identity politics in a segregated society.

This paper discusses the function of underground communities in the postmodernist novels Invisible Man and The Crying of Lot 49. While these novels appear different on the surface, there are a surprising number of themes which unite them. My central thesis explains that both the narrator of Invisible Man and Lot 49's Oedipa Maas are disadvantaged characters, due to either their race or gender, and their involvement in underground communities empowers them and gives them a new purpose.

Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African American literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance through the period of the Black Arts Movement to the present. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the various ways in which African American literature both shapes and is shaped by the changing conditions under which it is produced, including segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among others. Students develop critical thinking and communication skills through discussion and exams as they cultivate knowledge of texts covering a wide range of genres, themes, styles, and points of view. Key topics to which the course returns throughout the semester include the representation of race and gender, social and economic mobility, freedom, community, identity, and nationalism, among others. Students will also reinforce analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills; build content knowledge; and expand computer and information literacy by pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, digital humanities project culminating in the presentation of a research paper. A blog will be used to host course-relevant internet resources discovered and annotated by students. The research paper will incorporate one or more texts from the syllabus, internet resources from the blog, and at least one non-literary primary text (film, painting, photograph, song, etc.) so as to illuminate relations between literary works and the social, political, economic, and artistic culture as a whole.

Course syllabus on mid-century critical debates between Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. The course looks at the meaning of the Black writer under regimes of antiblack racism, in particular the place of politics, aesthetics, and vernacular culture among strategies of testimony and resistance. As well, the course examines the strange mixture (or lack thereof) of national and international concerns in an historical moment characterized by global south revolution and liberation.

Honorable mention, Darwin T. Turner Award for best essay in AAR, 2011. “In what follows I argue that the novels and essays of Ralph Ellison engage fruitfully and almost incessantly with such resonant tensions between the sacred and the profane, and that jazz serves, on the strength of those tensions, as the exemplary model for Ellison’s ambitious democratic vision.”

Afrofuturism is a transdisciplinary cultural movement based upon the unusual connection between the marginality of allegedly “primitive” people of the African diaspora and “modern” technology and science fiction. At a first glance, Afrofuturism may sound like an oxymoron. “Afro” and “Futurism” are likely to be considered as terms in opposition, the former which used to evoke images of primitivism and backwardness, the latter – ever since F. T. Marinetti’s definition in 1909 – celebrating instead speed and modernity. It is precisely to challenge this assumption that Afrofuturism works on a metaphorical level to reject a number of clichés that have commonly referred to people of African descent. Using a wide range of different genres and media, the creative contribution of Afrofuturist writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers and critics challenges the stereotypical historical view routinely applied to the Black Atlantic experience and proposes counter-histories that reconsider the role of black people in the Western society in the past and imagine alternative roles in the future. The paper aims to consider the different languages of Afrofuturism: music (Sun Ra), visual arts (Basquiat), film (John Coney’s Space is the Place) and especially literature − proto-Afrofuturist fiction such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920) and more recent examples such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979).

This book tests critical reassessments of US radical writing of the 1930s against recent developments in theories of modernism and the avant-garde. Multidisciplinary in approach, it considers poetry, fiction, classical music, commercial art, jazz, and popular contests (such as dance marathons and bingo). Relating close readings to social and economic contexts over the period 1856–1952, it centers in on a key author or text in each chapter, providing an unfolding, chronological narrative, while at the same time offering nuanced updates on existing debates. Part One focuses on the roots of the 1930s proletarian movement in poetry and music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part Two analyzes the output of proletarian novelists, considered alongside contemporaneous works by established modernist authors as well as more mainstream, popular titles.

Everyone knows who MLK was. Hardly anyone knows that MLK was the creation of the breakaway American followers of the modern mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. Led by A.R. Orage, a large group of highly accomplished Americans intervened in history by creating a modern civil messiah. To do this they followed a plan laid down four thousand years ago by the priests of Horus and two thousand years ago by the Essene community. Orage’s group of self-appointed spiritual supermen began in the early 1930s, and twice they failed. The third time they changed their strategy and the result was the charismatic civil rights activist, MLK. Ralph Ellison’s unpublished second novel Three Days Before the Shooting hides an account of this daring scheme beneath layers of ciphers, myth, and literary dazzle. Concealed within the American Communist Party and other groups, a cadre of writers, intellectuals, editors, lawyers, artists, and publishers staged an Objective Drama that made MLK a towering moral leader. Only in the disordered pages of Ellison’s esoteric, experimental novel is there a full account of this monumental project.

This is the beginning of an inquiry into the relationships among entanglement, the pursuit of quantum realism, and black revolutionary aesthetics. Or more specifically, it’s about physicist Albert Einstein, novelist Ralph Ellison, and political prisoner George Jackson, and how they spent their whole lives trying to describe the total systems of the physical world, the nation, the prison…and ended up discovering that systemic explanations could never be total, that there was something excessive coursing through even the most rational of systems. The world Enlightenment thought tried to totalize was cut by blackness, and, as it turned out, science, art, and politics were always happening elsewhere and otherwise. These are strange bedfellows, I know, but it’s a queer little text. It’s also a text about how I found black study, or how black study found me, and how it changed my relationship to knowledge, study, thought, The World.

The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them.

Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.

“Jack Turner has written a bold and provocative book. In his deft hands, appeals to personal responsibility become the basis for a robust democratic individualism attuned to the ugliness of racism, rather than a conservative justification that leaves racial inequalities in place. Awakening to Race is American political thought at its best.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Princeton University

“Does individualism have anything to offer the struggle for racial justice? Awakening to Race offers a resounding yes! Jack Turner’s book punctures the myths of American individualism that have helped to sustain racial hierarchies and advances fresh interpretations of self-reliance and personal responsibility stripped of their dishonesty. His writing embodies the spirit of the democratic citizen he finds in the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Ellison, and Baldwin: rigorous in its questioning of present conditions, compassionate, and intensely engaged.”—Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia

“In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner carves up American thought with a clean, theoretical scalpel, shredding the dangerous myths of individualism and self-reliance through which so many Americans still think about race. We desperately need these reminders of how many of our greatest writers, from Douglass to Baldwin, have prepared us for our enduring racial agony, if only we could wake up from our mythic slumber. An extraordinarily smart and timely book.”—David W. Blight, Yale University, author of American Oracle

“Jack Turner has canvassed a remarkable range of sources to develop a profoundly revisionist take on individualism, a theme absolutely central to the nation’s founding and which has ongoing—in fact heightened—relevance in the ‘postracial’ age-of-Obama United States. Turner both makes a convincing case that individualism as a central American value needs to be recaptured from the Right and demonstrates that the rich tradition of American political thought provides us with the necessary conceptual resources for doing so.”—Charles W. Mills, Northwestern University

Lawrence Jackson does a fine survey of African American writing from the 1930s through 1960.  Particularly insightful is his discussion of Richard Wright, whose work set the stage for a massive critique of white liberals.  Wright would never have taken that critique as far as the Black Power intellectuals of the sixties did, but that's precisely why this book is so fascinating.  It intelligently charts the evolution of ideas.  Less convincing in this book are some of Jackson's claims about J. Saunders Redding.  Despite this weakness, this is a solid book.

After the Second World War, many observers of American culture claimed that a “malaise” had descended upon the country. Sociologists like David Riesman and journalists like William H. Whyte wrote bestselling books about this malaise. Philosophers waxed extensively, calling it an “existential crisis.” Even Hollywood found angst to be a marketable thematic in films like Rebel without a Cause (1955), Rear Window (1954), and other productions in the mystery, suspense, and sci-fi genres. It’s not surprising that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed the period the “age of anxiety,” which is also the title of W. H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poetry in 1947.

This diagnosis of anxiety, malaise, loneliness, and crisis was in sharp contrast with the political rhetoric of the mid-century decades. For example, the publicist Henry Luce called for the United States to exert its economic and political strength globally, thus inaugurating what he termed the “American Century.” President Harry Truman would similarly characterize the U.S. as “the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.” Middle-class white America enjoyed unprecedented rates of high wages, home ownership, and for the first time had access to amenities like television sets and affordable sedans. So why was there so much anxiety? What assumptions were implicit in the diagnostic term “malaise”? What was occluded or overlooked in this diagnosis? And how might the postwar decades help us better understand the intellectual vocabulary and political culture of our present moment?

This course approaches these questions in American cultural history by looking to novels by Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Shirley Jackson, John Okada, and Patricia Highsmith, among others. The course lectures will also discuss thinkers who were influential in the postwar period, including Freud, Sartre, King, and Hannah Arendt.

This essay argues that historicized conceptions of American civil religion illuminate problems that hindered Ralph Ellison’s completion of his unfinished second novel.  Begun before Brown v. Board and occupying Ellison’s energies until his death in 1994, the second novel sought to “Negro-Americanize” the novel form over a timeframe that witnessed increasingly contested dynamics of “Negro” or “African American” identity matched only by changing conceptions of “America.”  Two exemplars of American civil religion frame this discussion: Martin Luther King, whose rhetoric and integrative vision of "America" echo Ellison's, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which Ellison served as a Trustee between 1971 and 1984 as it struggled to adapt to changing pedagogies and historiographies in public history.

Ralph Ellison offers crucial insight into the meaning of conscientious citizenship in American democracy. In doing so, he follows his nineteenth-century Transcendentalist forebears—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—who have become key figures in contemporary efforts to theorize liberal democratic character. At the center of Emersonian ethics is the idea of “awakening.” “Awakening” is the Emersonians' name for honest and courageous confrontation with reality. Ellison broadens the Emersonians' vision by insisting that one cannot be “well awake” in America without confronting the ways historical white supremacy shapes one's identity and chances in life. Political theorists who draw inspiration from the Emersonians in theorizing democratic individuality need to pay attention to Ellison—for he demonstrates that one cannot achieve democratic individuality without awakening to race.

Not only does Ralph Ellison’s writing reflect his background as a musician who played European classics and Southwestern blues-based jazz, and whose fiction reflect the
aesthetics of these worlds, but also his work reveals a vital connection to religion. It is O’Meally’s contention that Ellison viewed the Negro spiritual and sermon, with their frequent namings of the troubles of the world, as never more than two steps from the blues—Ellison’s model and metaphor for American culture. Ellison blended the two forms in an aesthetic and philosophy of transcendence that needed both to ring true. The spiritual dimension that always underlies his project as a writer is explored and developed.

I am an invisible man .... I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me .... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me (Ellison 1965:7). This opening statement has gained the same auspicious notoriety of Herman Melville's 'Call me Ishmael'. Its timbre has resonated around the world, carrying with it the longings of a generation struggling against the 'fragmenting, life-denying, de-humanizing conditions' (Wright 2003:178) that seek to deny their existence. As Ellison's protagonist explains: You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful (Ellison 1965:7). This essay will examine the web of worldliness investigated by Ralph Ellison in ...

The class struggle is often correlated to the racial struggle as an apparent motif throughout Ellison's Invisible Man; Ellison critiques the capitalist system that promotes individualism and monetary gain over collective consciousness and communal strength. Organized action, protest and the critique on mechanized labour and capitalism are at the focal point of the novel and these tools are used in an attempt to elevate the Harlem community. First, this paper will look at the varying anti-capitalist images throughout the novel. Then, it looks at the characters Brockway and Rinehart who uphold the capitalist and white paradigm by reinforcing negative black stereotypes and precluding effective organization and action. Then, it will convey how Ras prophetically alluded to the malignant system of capitalism that sacrifices community for money; he links the futility of this system to the problematic dispersal of the black community. Last, the paper will contend that the overt theme and solution to this malignant system is effective organization (through oratory talent) and action against the paradigms that bar the community (whether working class or racially oppressed-the two often are analogous in this struggle). This imagery culminates within the figure Dupre, who is effectively taking organized action against the white racist and capitalist paradigms by using the rhetorical , organizational and intellectual tools that were gifted to him by speakers like the Narrator who are symbolic of the talented tenth. Often it is the talented tenth that are seen as uplifting the entire community , such as was considered the case in Harlem communities at the time Ellison wrote (through the foundational tools wrought on via leftist political ideology).