“That Pause for Contemplation”

In “’That Pause for Contemplation’: A Centennial Meditation on Ralph Ellison,” John Callahan—Ellison’s literary executor and the dean of Ellison studies—looks back upon Ellison’s life and work, asking what Ellison’s accomplishment looks like 100 years after his birth, and a new century proceeds in his wake. Beginning with the “thought experiment” of a young Barack Obama jogging past Ralph Ellison in New York in the 1980s, Callahan meditates on Ellison’s investigation of the relationship between the individual search for identity and America’s pursuit of democratic equality. Drawing upon Ellison’s wealth of posthumously published material—the short stories, essays, interviews, and his unfinished second novel—Callahan emphasizes Ellison’s relentless pursuit of the novel form as his means of interrogating the fluid, improvisational, evolving form of American identity. Callahan probes the omnipresent father figures that dominate Ellison’s work after Invisible Man—Lewis Ellison, Abraham Lincoln, Alonzo Hickman, and others.

Mourning and Melancholy

Ross Posnock’s “Mourning and Melancholy: Explaining the Ellison Animus” investigates the “animus” or sense of resentment and criticism that has dogged Ellison from Invisible Man’s first appearance through the last decade. He argues that the animus has become a generational sense of grievance, mixed with melancholy, reflecting a disappointed, idealized sense of Ellison. Arnold Rampersad’s recent biography is dominated by a simultaneous idealization and frustration that is Oedipal in nature. This sense of promise unfulfilled also dominates Barbara Foley’s assessment, particularly in her heroization of the figure of LeRoy, the proletarian revolutionary manqué who appeared in early drafts of Invisible Man. Like Obama, Ellison becomes the locus of idealism mixed with hostility. Posnock argues for a realization of their flawed humanity and refusal of easy affirmation and ideal reflection. Both men insist upon a similar self-reliance of thought on the part of their audience, which rejects political creed and racial essentialism.

“In a Strange Country”

Lucas Morel’s “‘In a Strange Country’: The Challenge of American Inclusion” interprets Ellison’s 1944 short story as a civics lesson for a republic struggling with the legacy of race. The story follows a black Merchant Marine, Mr. Parker, during World War II as he recovers from a mugging by white American servicemen while on shore leave in Wales. Ellison presents a lesson of civic inclusion by showcasing a “black Yank” being rescued by Welshmen. Parker witnesses how his Welsh hosts transcend class conflict through a common devotion to music, which he likened to the racially mixed “jam sessions” back in America. Herein Ellison articulates the obstacles and pathways to black American citizenship—a reminder that “the land of the free” requires one not only to be “brave” in the face of majority tyranny, but also good-humored, self-disciplined, and hopeful as one seeks full participation in the American regime.

Invisible Man in the Age of Obama

Bryan Crable’s “Invisible Man in the Age of Obama: Ellison on (Color) Blindness, Visibility, and the Hopes for a Postracial America” offers a bold view of the implications of Ellison’s work on the enduring American questions of race and color. Crable takes up the discourse of Barack Obama’s 2011 re-election campaign to see how it reveals the influence of Ellison’s analysis of appearance, of visibility and invisibility. In the Age of Obama, does the problem of the color line still persist? Have we entered into a post-racial America? By pursuing the crucial connections between these two paradigmatic American writers, Crable concludes, “The discourse surrounding Obama’s first term (and his quest for re-election) simply reminds us that Invisible Man’s work is not yet done; it remains as important for us today as it was for readers in 1952.”

Invisible Man and the Politics of Love

Robert Butler’s “Invisible Man and the Politics of Love” rebuts the critique of Ellison as insufficiently engaged politically and alienated from authentic black culture, voiced most recently in Arnold Rampersad’s biography and Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Butler argues that this view of Ellison misreads the extent of Ellison’s authentic political commitment, which is far more rigorous and complex than Foley’s reductive treatment of his so-called flight from leftist extremism into “mythic individualism.” Butler explores what he calls Ellison’s commitment to Christian love and integration, bringing into relief a political vision that is far more harmonious with the Civil Rights activism of Martin Luther King than the outmoded Marxism that Ellison abandoned in the early 1940s. In Butler’s view, Ellison’s political concept of integration and mutual love is strongly attuned to the needs of America in the 21st century.

The New Territory

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.

The Noisy Lostness

Herman Beavers’s “The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invisible Man” explores Ellison’s complex analyses of jazz and bebop music, situating Ellison’s views in the larger context of modernism. Drawing upon the nascent discipline of Sound Studies, Beavers emphasizes the quality of “oppositionality” in such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong to interpret Invisible Man as an instance of oppositional, as opposed to revolutionary, narrative. Beavers views the novel as a study of the disruption of the feedback loop between listening and speaking, in which Ellison uses noise as a disruptive, “acousmatic” presentation of the black body. By showing how the narrator shifts from the prison of sight to the freedom of sound, and thus from regulation to improvisation, Beavers argues that the narrator finally moves from a misguided trust in false systems of protection to a tactical realization of the security of chaos.

“How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take to Screw in a Blues Singer?”

In “‘How many light bulbs does it take to screw in a blues singer?’: The French Revolution, King Louis Armstrong, and the Futuristic Jungleism of Jazz,” Steven C. Tracy argues that Invisible Man reveals a futuristic mode beneath seemingly primitive elements. The “jungleism” of the novel, whether represented by the narrator’s basement apartment or jazz music, operates ironically to show how black Americans exercised agency and worked towards liberation despite their oppressive environment. Through the artistry of Louis Armstrong, Tracy examines his adaptation of the Andy Razaf song “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue?” to show the genius of blackness and blues-ness. Armstrong uses a lyrical black lament over life in a white-supremacist society to show off the heights of musical artistry. Ultimately, Tracy explores how Ellison presents purity as “illusory and oppressive” and counters with its opposite—hybridity and heterogeneity, emblematic of the post-modern world.

Invisible Man’s Grandfather and the American Dream

Steven D. Ealy’s “Invisible Man’s Grandfather and the American Dream” examines the grandfather in Invisible Man, an enigmatic figure from whom the narrator learns despite his doubts about the wisdom of a former slave. Highlighting Invisible Man’s identification with a hibernating bear, Ealy examines what the narrator, or “Jack-the-Bear,” discovers about his grandfather’s deathbed advice. The grandfather offers Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington as key figures for the narrator’s instruction. The chief insight gained from his grandfather is what he calls “the principle on which the country was built.” By leaving this principle undefined, the narrator invites the reader to wrestle with the meaning of human equality in a world whose practice falls short of this ideal. Ealy spells out one implication by connecting “the principle” with the South African concept of ubuntu, where love becomes the means by which each person’s humanity is acknowledged in the public sphere.

The Politics of Fatherhood in Three Days before the Shooting …

Lena Hill’s “The Politics of Fatherhood in Three Days Before the Shooting . . .” examines Ellison’s use of fathers and sons to explore the role of African Americans in U.S. history. Hill focuses on the use of visual art in Three Days to present a sophisticated response by African Americans to their ambivalent place in America’s political development. She shows how the novel’s protagonist, the Rev. A. Z. Hickman, appreciates and reflects upon visual art, thereby embodying what Ellison believes African Americans contributed to the land of their birth: an astute, self-reliant judgment of the nation’s practices in light of its professions. In contrast with sociologically-reductive accounts of black victimhood, Hill reads Ellison as interpreting American history as involving significant African American agency and influence that belies their status as second-class citizens.