Ralph Ellison learned from Mark Twain that "a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, to keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal." In one of his last public speeches, Ellison challenged American writers "to take individual responsibility for the health of American democracy" in their literary endeavors. The original essays in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope illuminate Ellison's work to enrich the political sensibilities and strengthen the democratic resolve of his audience. In Ellison's day, rampant social upheaval was the hallmark of a divided America, and those hoping to improve society through concerted democratic action encountered powerful opposition. Conflict and discord filled buses and churches, courtrooms and legislative halls, dinner tables and negotiating tables. Warriors on all sides took their battles into the streets, and this atmosphere permeated the text of Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man.
Ellison's relevance as a political novelist, essayist, and commentator did not end with the publication of Invisible Man or as the civil rights movement waned. This collection of essays demonstrates that Invisible Man deserves its place in the pantheon of great American novels and that Ellison should be regarded as an essential framer of recent American political thought. His conception of America's basic democratic project -- strangers, bound together by common citizenship, crafting a vision for America's future and forging consensus on the path toward that goal -- is especially valid in the new century as the nation struggles with divisions and contradictions unimagined during Ellison's lifetime. The essays in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope probe the political lessons of the landmark novel Invisible Man, in which Ellison reflects on the sacred ideals that set the American republic into motion. He explores the contrast between modern statements of those ideals and the policies that subverted them, ceaselessly exhorting his fellow writers to bring their acute insights to these crucial questions. Drawing from literature, politics, history, and the law, the contributors demonstrate how Ralph Ellison set the tone and agenda for a politically charged era.
Lucas E. Morel, the Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and Politics at Washington and Lee University, is the author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government.
Table of Contents
Contributors
IX
Acknowledgments
XI
Prologue: Recovering the Political Artistry of Invisible Man
1
Chapter 1
Affirming the Principle
22
Chapter 2
Ralph Ellison on the Tragi-Comedy of Citizenship
37
Chapter 3
Ralph Ellison's American Democratic Individualism
58
Chapter 4
Invisible Man and Juneteenth: Ralph Ellison's Literary Pursuit of Racial Justice
91
Chapter 5
Invisible Man as "a form of social power": The Evolution of Ralph Ellison's Politics
105
Chapter 6
Invisible Man as Literary Analog to Brown v. Board of Education
119
Chapter 7
Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority: The Lessons of Little Rock
142
Chapter 8
Ralph Ellison and the Invisibility of the Black Intellectual: Historical Reflections on Invisible Man
158
Chapter 9
The Litany of Things: Sacrament and History in Invisible Man
171
Chapter 10
Documenting Turbulence: The Dialectics of Chaos in Invisible Man
193
Epilogue: The Lingering Question of Personality and Nation in Invisible Man: "And could politics ever be an expression of love?"
