Summer/Fall 2011
although “I didn’t always agree with him,” Locke “did point a direction… he did move in the direction of some sort of conscious assessment of the pluralistic condition of the United States.”6 The trouble was, when it remained singularly black, the consciousness produced in that assessment did not sufficiently pluralize its own condition. It was on such grounds that Ellison had famously dismissed the nationalist Richard Wright as “no spiritual father of mine.” Explaining this heresy in 1964, Ellison wrote: “While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ‘ancestors.’ Wright was, in this sense, a ‘relative,’ Hemingway an ‘ancestor.’”7 Here Ellison refused a compulsory, commonsense identification with Wright the fellow novelist and “race man” in deference to his own expressive priorities. In doing so, Ellison not only distanced himself from a simplistic vision of blackness as a duty but also drew an important distinction between black inspiration and black style, the latter being less desirable in requiring that one take a creative exemption from whatever nonblack contexts one inhabits. In this way, Ellison showed an alertness to the presence of competing universalities within black cultural politics, and a willingness to negotiate them in his work, that were rare at the same time.8
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1 Romare Bearden Homage to Duke, Bessie and Louis, c. 1980 Museum Purchase and a gift from E. Thomas Williams and Audlyn Higgins Williams 97.9.4
1. Kenneth Burke, “Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston (Washington, 1987), 350.
4. Ellison, “ARB,” 689.
2. Ellison’s legacy acquired a new shade in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s 1991 attack on black essentialists, against whom Schlesinger uses Ellison as a foil. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York, 1991), 91.
7. Ellison, quoted in Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago, 2003), 18. See Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Ellison 2003, 155-188.
3. “The Art of Romare Bearden” (hereafter “ARB”), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2003), 688-697. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of Ellison’s prose refer to this edition. The term Projections describes the photostatic enlargements that Bearden from his collages; it was suggested by Bearden’s dealer, Arne Ekstrom.
5. Ralph Ellison, “Alain Locke,” in Ellison 2003, 448. 6. Ellison, “Alain Locke,” 446.
8. The term competing universalities is Judith Butler’s. See Judith Butler, “Contingent Universalities,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (London, 2000). 168.
2 Romare Bearden Blue Rain, Mecklenburg, 1987 Museum Purchase and a gift from E. Thomas Williams and Audlyn Higgins Williams, New York 97.9.14