Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Great Migration to White Flight

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Flight ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Post War

Shortly after Ralph Ellison’s protagonist arrives in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a man wearing Charlie Chaplin pants, “pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper,” and singing a blues song that reminds the protagonist of home. Often read as a carrier of blues and vernacular traditions within the novel, Wheatstraw is also a literal carrier of building plans, all of which point to the ascendancy of Robert Moses and his New York City Slum Clearance Committee under the aegis of the Federal Housing Act of 1949. This chapter reads Ellison in relation to this emergent regime of post-war planning to suggest we think about Invisible Man not as a novel about a Jim Crow system passing into history, but about the tensions between the emergent racial regime of racial liberalism and white flight out of which neoliberalism would emerge.

“Beating Eggs Never Makes the Evening News”

Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Urban Families ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
New Space ◽  
Post War ◽  
Poor Nutrition ◽  
Southern Country

In One Crazy Summer and its sequels P.S. Be Eleven, and Gone Crazy in Alabama, Rita Williams-Garcia tracks the movement of African-American diasporas, generationally and geographically, through changes in food preparation and consumption. This chapter examines the third novel in the series first, showing how Delphine, the protagonist, becomes aware that her family’s identity is grounded in the deep roots of southern country foodways, dependent on personally raised or locally produced foods (especially milk and eggs) that are usually slow-cooked. The middle novel demonstrates the popularity of post-war convenience foods, cooked quickly and simply to match the faster tempo of urban life common to the generation that had made the Great Migration. The first novel, set in urban Oakland in the revolutionary year of 1968, shows the revolutionary power of food, most overtly through the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, which sought to better life for urban families by improving poor nutrition as well as to empower them politically. The novel also presents the deconstruction of the traditional kitchen: Cecile, the mother of Delphine and her sisters, rejects and revises the “yoke” of women’s service to men and family by making her kitchen into an art studio, redefining it as a new space that is both maternal and professional.

Ralph Ellison's Contemporaneity

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-36
Author(s):  
Torleif Persson
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
The Social

Abstract This article begins by noting that recent debates about the relevance of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to contemporary American culture enact an opposition between historicism (the idea that the novel is a Jim Crow artifact) and universalism (the idea that it transcends the circumstances of its production). The author then argues that Ellison's novel models a contemporaneity that cannot be equated to either the assertion or disavowal of contemporaneousness. At the heart of this account stands the narrator's sense that he “must emerge,” which follows from his perception that he has failed to communicate the nature of his invisibility to his reader, and that his act of writing has therefore disarmed him. The article shows that the narrator's emergence—an event that is necessitated by the narrative but which the narrative, by the very logic of that necessity, cannot itself contain—constitutes the hinge between the textual temporality of his underground existence and the social temporality that abuts it. As such, it offers the possibility that these two temporalities—which may be thought of as referring to the temporality of writing and the temporality of reading, respectively—may be linked, and that this linkage could lead to forms of recognition that appear only at the limit of narrative form.

Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Redefining Fundamentalism in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Quratulain Shirazi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Immigrant Student ◽  
American System ◽  
American Nationalism ◽  
Globalized World

This article is based on a study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a novel by a Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid.  The novel is based on the  story of  transformation of an expat Pakistani living in New York from a true cosmopolitan to a nationalist. The article will explore the crisis of identity suffered by the protagonist in a new land where he reached as an immigrant  student and worker. However, he experienced a resurgence of nationalist and patriotic sentiments within him as 9/ 11 happened in 2001.  The force of American nationalism that was imperial in nature, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iran, triggered resentment in the protagonist who decided to leave America and went back to the country of his origin, Pakistan. During his stay in America, the protagonist redefined fundamentalism as an imperial tendency in the American system while rejecting the accusations hurled towards him of an Islamic fundamentalist. The article will explain that there is a loss of cosmopolitan virtue  in the post 9/11 era and the dream of universal peace and harmony  is shattered due to unbridled  state ambitions to invade foreign territories.   The article will conclude with the assertion that the loss of cosmopolitanism and reassertion of national identities give way to confrontation and intolerance destroying the prospects of peace and harmony in a globalized world.

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-166
Author(s):  
Johannes Görbert ◽  
Russ Pottle ◽  
Jeff Morrison ◽  
Pramod K. Nayar ◽  
Dirk Göttsche ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Alexander Von Humboldt ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Review Finding ◽  
University Of Massachusetts

German Literary Anthropology: Across Cultures, Across Genres Stefan Hermes and Sebastian Kaufmann, eds., Der ganze Mensch – die ganze Menschheit: Völkerkundliche Anthropologie, Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 318 pp., 10 illustrations, €89.95What’s Old Is New Again, Mostly Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 325 pp., $90Complex Journeys around the World and through Literary and Intellectual Traditions around 1800 Johannes Görbert, Die Vertextung der Welt: Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt und Adelbert von Chamisso. Weltliteraturen/World Literatures, Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, vol. 7 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), vi, 426 pp., 8 illustrations, €109.95Travel as Cultural Work Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 170 pp., $26.95Colonial Encounters between Africa and Europe—with Special Reference to Austria and Switzerland Manuel Menrath, ed., Afrika im Blick: Afrikabilder im deutschsprachigen Europa, 1870–1970 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012), 329 pp., €43Social Formations and Literary Forms in Long Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 248 pp., 21 illustrations, $95Travel Accounts of Polar Regions and Colonial Discourse Mike Frömel, Off ene Räume und gefährliche Reisen im Eis: Reisebeschreibungen über die Polarregionen und ein kolonialer Diskurs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2013), 288 pp., €29.50.“Imagined Geographies” and the Navigation of British European Identity Katarina Gephardt, Th e Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 248 pp., 15 illustrations, $104.95Terminal and Threshold: Experiencing the Airport Christopher Schaberg, Th e End of Airports (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 216 pp., 25 illustrations, £13.99NOVEL REVIEW Finding Purity Jonathan Franzen, Purity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 563 pp., $28

Comedy, Class, and Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Tew
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Cultural Commodification ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Post War ◽  
Recurrent Motifs

This chapter studies the comic novel. If British and Irish culture in the post-war decades underwent some radical social and political upheavals, the novel registered and critiqued these transformations in part through the development of a particular comic mode. Comedy in British and Irish novels published from 1940 to 1973 often turned around the difficult intersection of class and nation. Alongside this overarching attention to class and nation, a number of other recurrent motifs can be traced in the comic novel of the period, such as the representation of cultural commodification, the decline of traditional values, and the emergence of new forms of youth culture. In the context of such widespread changes to the narratives that shaped public life, the comic novel expressed an ironic scepticism concerning the capacity of any cultural narrative to offer an adequate account of contemporary identities.

Wieland; or The Transformation, and Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Brockden Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spontaneous Combustion ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Actual Case ◽  
Her Family ◽  
American Novels

One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennyslvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, and her family, destroying the order and authority of the small community in which they live. Underlying the mystery and horror, however, is a profound examination of the human mind's capacity for rational judgement. The text also explores some of the most important issues vital to the survival of democracy in the new American republic. Brown further considers power and manipulation in his unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which traces Carwin's career as a disciple of the utopist Ludloe.

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