Ralph Ellison, The Next Fifty Years

A special issue of boundary 2

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Edited by Ronald A. T. Judy and Jonathan Arac

Duke University Press

Due/Published July 2003, 232 pages, paper

ISBN 0822365596

A special issue of boundary 2, Vol. 30, No. 2 (F03)

While Ralph Ellison is perhaps best known for his novel Invisible Man, he was also a significant twentieth-century intellectual, having authored numerous essays and papers that shaped thought on subjects from jazz to liberalism. Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years gathers scholars in the fields of American and African American studies to engage Ellison's theoretical and critical writings.

Several essays in this collection focus on an area of Ellison's thinking that has yet to be adequately scrutinized--his study of, and writing about, music, specifically jazz and the blues. Although not a systematic philosopher of music, Ellison exhibited the seriousness and rigor associated with the critical musical writings of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said. Other essays in this special issue examine salient questions raised by Ellison's work, including the nature of the connection between the novel and the democratic mind, Vietnam and the crisis of liberal society, and the problematic of modernism and freedom. Ralph Ellison addresses the ways in which Ellison's writings about art were also efforts to think about and discuss political agency.

Contributors: Jonathan Arac, Kevin Bell, Adam Gussow, Ronald A. T. Judy, Robert O'Meally, Donald E. Pease, Barry Shank, Hortense Spillers, Kenneth Warren, Alexander G. Weheliye, John Wright

Contents

Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years -- Ronald A. T.Judy
"The Little Man at Chehaw Station" Today -- Hortense J. Spillers
The Embrace of Entropy: Ralph Ellison and the Freedom Principle of Jazz Invisible -- Kevin Bell
Bliss, or Blackface Sentiment -- Barry Shank
Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: The Nonsymbolizable (Trans)Action -- Donald E. Pease
"I Am I Be": The Subject of Sonic Afro-modernity -- Alexander G. Weheliye
Checking Our Balances: Ellison on Armstrong's Humor -- Robert G. O'Meally
"Fingering the Jagged Grain": Ellison's Wright and the Southern Blues Violences -- Adam Gussow
Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority -- Kenneth W. Warren
"Jack-the-Bear" Dreaming: Ellison's Spiritual Technologies -- John S. Wright
Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S.Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years -- Jonathan Arac