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"Ellison, Ralph -- Philosophy"
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African American political thought and American culture : the nation's struggle for racial justice
\"This book demonstrates how certain African American writers radically re-envisioned core American ideals in order to make them serviceable for racial justice. Each writer's unprecedented reconstruction of key American values has the potential to energize American citizenship today\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Reconstructing Individualism:A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison
America has a love-hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers-Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers' shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived-or, in Dewey's term, \"reconstructed\"-individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.
eBook
Reconstructing Individualism
America has a love-hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers-Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers' shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived-or, in Dewey's term, \"reconstructed\"-individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.
eBook
Ralph Ellison and the Scientific Management of Slavery and Education
As a distinctively American philosophy, pragmatism provides the philosophical foundation for many progressive thinkers in the African American intellectual tradition. For some, pragmatism can serve as an instrument for addressing our contemporary racial challenges and the afterlife of slavery in the United States. Ironically, it is challenging to situate Ralph Ellison comfortably in this intellectual lineage—even though several scholars have located and studied him and his work within the context of pragmatism. In fact, Ellison’s polemics and contradictions mirror the problems and paradoxes one often finds among leading pragmatic thinkers in the Progressive Era, including John Dewey and Frederick Winslow Taylor. However, few studies consider what we can learn when Ellison’s work is imagined within the context of Dewey’s and Taylor’s competing appreciations of scientific management. This interdisciplinary survey explores this context by revealing how a recalibration of Ellison’s writing can help us to see how scientific management and its imperative emerge in slavery and later proliferate in American education. Based on this evidence, it becomes more difficult to argue that pragmatism can serve as an effective tool for addressing and transforming our contemporary racial challenges and the afterlife of slavery in the United States.
Journal Article
THE CLASSICS, RACE, AND COMMUNITY-ENGAGED OR PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Our discipline has always been, at its core, concerned with language. At its best, The American Journal of Philology has professed to being a forum for those seeking knowledge of the words and worlds of Greece and Rome. It is unreasonable, however, to disentangle the discipline of philology and its allied fields—art history, philosophy, archaeology, and so forth—from the modern realities of slavery, race, and their impacts well after global abolition, emancipation, and any declaration of a postracial period. That is, we bring a great deal of cultural baggage to what we call the Classics.
Journal Article
The Rites of Identity
The Rites of Identityargues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are firmly situated within the American tradition of religious naturalism, and that this tradition--properly understood as religious--offers a highly useful means for considering contemporary identity and mitigating religious conflict.
Beth Eddy adds Burke and Ellison to a tradition of religious naturalism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson but received its most nuanced expression in the work of George Santayana. Through close readings of the essays and fiction of Burke and Ellison, Eddy shows the extent to which their cultural criticisms are intertwined. Both offer a naturalized understanding of piety, explore the psychological and social dynamics of scapegoating, and propose comic religious resources. And both explicitly connect these religious categories to identity, be it religious, racial, national, ethnic, or gendered. Eddy--arguing that the most socially damaging uses of religious language and ritual are connected to the best uses that such language has to offer--finds in Burke and Ellison ways to manage this precarious situation and to mitigate religious violence through wise use of performative symbolic action.
By placing Burke and Ellison in a tradition of pragmatic thought,The Rites of Identityuncovers an antiessentialist approach to identity that serves the moral needs of a world that is constantly negotiating, performing, and ritualizing changes of identity.
eBook
Cultivating Moral Attention in Ellison's Invisible Man and Murdoch's Moral Theory
Is Invisible Man a sexist novel? Some critics have said so. I argue that reading Invisible Man solely with a focus on gender representation misses an ethically significant dynamic between Ralph Ellison's narrator and white women. Reading Invisible Man alongside Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy reveals a shared emphasis on cultivating attention to the realities of individuals by resisting fantasy. In viewing white women, the invisible man undergoes a Murdochian moral pilgrimage from fantasy to reality with courage, humility, and generosity. By situating this triumph within the American white supremacist patriarchy, Ellison corrects some of Murdoch's disengagement from politics.
Journal Article
Well-Wrought Black Thought: Speculative Realism and the Specter of Race
This essay presents a method for analyzing literary and cultural texts that I call black thought. Black thought reveals how changing the skin color of a protagonist in modern Western literature would result in an ontological crisis of coherence within the text because its historically contingent racial codes, genre-based discursive conventions, internal plot structure, and governing registers would summarily fail. At this point of collapse, we can ask questions such as “why couldn’t this character be read as legibly black (or white)?” at the given historical moment or, “what elements of this work’s governing structure would have to change so that a particular character could be plausibly read under a different racial category?” Through exemplifying the practice of black thought in the writings of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, as well as Arthur Laurents’s 1946 play Home of the Brave, Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle, and the artwork of Diego Velázquez vis-à-vis Kerry James Marshall, I show how students and scholars would benefit from seeking to determine why changing the race of a work’s protagonist would necessitate the creation of a fundamentally different text or historical context, which brings the study of literature into conversation with other fields, such as political theory, history, sociology, and psychology.
Journal Article
Buddhist Recognition in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
This essay thus expands the argument of African American works is a form of prose separate from the necessary conditions that made it into a democratized style of writing. It is a style in response to an imposed social order, yet its transcendence must also lie in the “paradox” that the oppressed condition one fought “gave the writer’s life meaning” (Warren 18). German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued “proof that even our inner experience…is possible only on the assumption of outer experience” (B 275). In Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, he states that we must “show that we have experience, and not merely imagination of outer things” (B 275). So, what matters most is not only the uncovering of the woes of black lives through Ellison’s novel but the expansion of what steps of Buddhist practice are analogous to and emerge from the historical progression novel. Invisible Man may serve as a guide in showing a character’s progression through the Buddhist practice process. Discussing the eastern influence of Ellison’s novel is an additional step in expanding on progressive narrative works of Buddhist recognition.
Journal Article
Urban Underworlds
Urban Underworldsis an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as \"urban underworlds\" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.
eBook