Notes

Introduction

1 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

2 Consider, for instance, Sartain, Invisible Activists; Pye, Invisible Children; and Prats, Invisible Natives. A search for “invisible” in any university library catalog will yield a host of similar results.

3 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

4 The OED suggests that ectoplasm “is supposed to emanate from the body of a spiritualistic medium, and to develop into a human form or face.” OED Online, s.v. “ectoplasm,” www.oed.com. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain—a novel concerned with racial vagaries in America—famously explores “spook” as a supernatural/racial term, owing a clear debt to Ellison in its excavation of identity and its vagaries in America.

5 Franchot, “Invisible Doman,” 835, 837.

6 Ibid., 840.

7 See Rojas, From Black Power, esp. 1–21.

8 L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 11–12.

9 Ziolkowski, Modes of Faith; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 6; C. Taylor, Secular Age, esp. chap. 15; and Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 7. For further discussions of secularity in religion and literature that specifically take Franchot’s “Invisible Doman” into account, see Fessenden, “Problem of the Postsecular,” 154–67; and Modern, “How to Read Literature,” 191–203.

10 Malik, Meaning of Race, traces the intellectual and political evolution of this problem. See especially his first three chapters.

11 See L. P. Jackson’s summary of the response to Invisible Man in Indignant Generation, 355–61.

12 Ottley, “Blazing Novel”; Martin, “Book Reviews”; Howe, “Negro in America,” 454; Barkham, “Ellison Manipulates His Wrath,” B6; Bellow, “Man Underground,” 608–9; Mayberry, “Underground Notes,” 19; K. G. Jackson, “Books in Brief,” 105. Bellow’s alternatives to “particular” Negro identity comprise a rather narrow universe: “Negro Harlem is at once primitive and sophisticated; it exhibits the extremes of instinct and civilization as few other American communities do. If a writer dwells on the peculiarity of this, he ends with an exotic effect. And Mr. Ellison is not exotic. For him this balance of instinct and culture is not a Harlem matter; it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter very little understood” (609). For a more detailed discussion of Ellison and Bellow, see chapters 5–6 of Greif, Age of the Crisis of Man, 145–203.

13 Morris, “World Below,” 5; Mayberry, “Underground Notes,” 19; Webster, “Inside a Dark Shell”; Hedden, “Objectively Vivid, Introspectively Sincere,” BR5; DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 13. One Negro protagonist to whom several reviewers refer is Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Significantly, the invisible man is almost always distinguished from Bigger Thomas in favor of these Western archetypes.

14 Breit, “Talk with Ralph Ellison,” 26.

15 “Antagonistic cooperation” (or, as I’ll sometimes phrase it, “cooperative antagonism” or “cooperative-antagonistic,” as I do here) appears in Ellison’s criticism as a way of highlighting the demanding mutual regard that adversaries must carry for one another. He holds out the prospect to Irving Howe in “The World and the Jug” (in Collected Essays, 188); he defines the role of an audience as antagonistically cooperative—that is, “acting, for better or worse, as both collaborator and judge”—in “The Little Man in Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience” (ibid., 492). In “Going to the Territory” the term describes jazz’s democratic impulse, pitting stylistically particular artists against one another as they strive for a creative common good (ibid., 598). See also Ellison’s foreword to John Kouwenhoven’s The Beer Can by the Highway (ibid., 846).

16 L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 359–60.

17 See esp. L. Jackson, Ralph Ellison, chaps. 7–10; and Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, chaps. 4–6. Foley, Wrestling with the Left, part 1, offers a thorough reading of Ellison’s leftist background prior to Invisible Man.

18 Another reason Native Son served as such a gold standard for the Negro novel was its status as a best seller, due in no small part to its nomination as Book of the Month Club choice for March 1940. Consequently, Native Son became, in contrast to most other Negro novels, a national and international sensation, selling as many as two thousand copies a day at its peak. It very likely represented the only Negro novel that many, if not most, of its readers had read. In order to gain recognition by the club, Wright had to excise a number of scenes and depictions that were considered too controversial. See Rowley, Richard Wright, 180–84.

19 Foley takes strong issue with language like I deploy here, arguing that it reflects a kind of circularity that privileges Ellison’s own terms for reading Invisible Man. I agree that for her purposes of “be-fogging” this lens, she offers a helpful—dare I say “corrective”—template to certain earlier rhetorical excesses (Wrestling with the Left, 1). Still, what Foley clarifies in her “reading forward” of Invisible Man remains a constructed literary perspective that draws on the underpinning of Cold War ideology to articulate political and cultural alternatives to leftist aesthetics (15). No small part of this impulse is a strategic annihilation of materiality—the “making invisible” of materialism—that invokes certain religious and theological sensibilities. In this way, as I elaborate in the coming pages, my goal is not simply to shout back in the face of Foley’s corrective (a provisional version of which I am willing to grant) but instead to offer an attempt to render her corrective “more perfect,” to offer a countercorrective to Foley’s corrective, as it were.

20 Ralph Ellison, letter to Morteza D. Sprague, May 19, 1954. Rpt. in Ellison, “American Culture,” 24–49.

21 See, for instance, the fascinating series of debates between William Julius Wilson and Kenneth Warren concerning the television serial The Wire: Wilson and Chaddha, “‘Way Down in the Hole,’” 164–88, and Warren’s response, “Sociology and The Wire,” 200–207. The debate continues online: Wilson, “Response”; Warren, “Response.”

22 Murray, Hero and the Blues, 15. Murray’s phrase is “social science fiction fiction,” meaning fiction that is social science fiction. I’ve shortened the phrase here for the sake of clarity.

23 Murray writes: “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precinct, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is . . . incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble one another.” And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society” (Omni-Americans, 22; italics in the original).

24 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. Of course, it remains entirely plausible that the invisible man pitches such a denial as the ironist and dissembler I depict him as in the opening pages of this introduction. As Ellison’s next paragraph illustrates, the question is not “whither protest,” but what manner of protest. For the Negro–human being dichotomy, see Schwartz, “Fiction Chronicle,” 358–59.

25 Ellison, “Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 212. He articulates a form of this sentiment later in “Society, Morality,” first published in 1957, by claiming that “All Americans are . . . members of minority groups, even Anglo-Saxons, whose image has from the beginning dominated all the rest, and one meaning of the social friction in American life is the struggle of each racial, cultural, and religious group to have its own contribution to the national image recognized and accepted” (Collected Essays, 703).

26 It is vital to understand that Ellison does not mean that “black” experience should be translated as “white.” As he says in “The Art of Fiction,”

If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the anti-protest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level, identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically. The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary re-creation of society. Negro writers have felt this and it has led to much of our failure.

Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics, to plead the Negro’s humanity.

Ibid., 212–13.

27 Ibid., 212.

28 Universals prove tricky, as we’ll encounter again in the coming pages. Foley (see chapters 2 and 3 of Wrestling with the Left, 69–149), for instance, broadly dismisses them, and certainly a kind of violence has been exacted in their name. Yet I argue below that it is precisely in this violence that we must take them seriously as social constructs. Universals, like race, do not exist. But, like race, the fact that they have been understood to exist requires that we not dismiss them too quickly or easily.

29 Ellison, “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” 696.

30 Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 129.

31 Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 701.

32 See, for instance, Baraka and Neal, Black Fire; Collins and Crawford, New Thoughts; J. H. Cone, Black Theology; Joseph, Black Power Movement and Waiting; Ogbar, Black Power; and Smithurst, Black Arts Movement.

33 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 452–53.

34 Interestingly, this incident resonates with an account in Perlstein’s Nixonland. In the 1966 midterm elections, Iowa Representative Fred Schmidhauser, a Democrat who won his seat on Lyndon Johnson’s coattails in 1964, “appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats’ agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago’s Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, ‘on motorcycles.’ . . . Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration was inevitable” (142).

35 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 439–40.

36 Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 397.

37 There’s a fascinating way in which Ellison wields his authorship of Invisible Man as a trump card against detractors on the Right and Left. Consider Ralph Ellison’s (never mailed) response to S. D. Claghorn, who wrote a letter disparaging Ellison’s article “What America Would Be Like without Blacks,” in Time magazine: “My response is simple: I am quite willing to admit I [as an African American] am inferior if you are willing to admit I wrote Invisible Man.” As Adam Bradley summarizes Ellison’s point of view, “Black achievement in culture is the greatest defense” (Ralph Ellison in Progress, 70–72).

38 Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’” 447.

39 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.

40 Schleiermacher’s second speech in On Religion (1799) denominates “the essence of religion” as “the universe and the relationship of humanity to it” (19), “the unifying principle . . . for . . . dissimilar material” (20). “Thus to accept everything individual as part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite” is religion (25). In this way religion becomes a dialectic between the part and the whole, the many and the one. Scholars have developed a shorthand for thinking of Schleiermacher’s dialectic of religion as consisting between the particular and the universal. This dialectic informs Schleiermacher’s understanding of hermeneutics as well: “As every utterance has a dual relationship, to the totality of language and to the whole thought of its originator, then all understanding also consists of the two moments, of understanding the utterance as derived from language, and as a fact in the thinker” (see Hermeneutics and Criticism, 8). In this way, “every person is on the one hand a location in which a given language forms itself in an individual manner, on the other their discourse can only be understood via the totality of the language.” Meaning depends upon successful navigation of both the particular concerns participant in the communicative exchange and their relation to the broader linguistic contours that they share (11–12).

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim argues that religion frequently functions analogically: “There is an aspect of every religion that transcends the realm of specifically religious ideas. . . . There is no religion that is not both a cosmology and a speculation about the divine” (8). Such cosmology and speculation, expressed through myths and rites that organize social structures, unify individuals who might otherwise share only a common location in time and space. “Mythologies,” Durkheim writes, “deal with beings that have the most contradictory attributes at the same time, that are one and many, material and spiritual, and capable of subdividing themselves indefinitely without losing that which makes them what they are” (12). This is to say, of course, that the function of religion in a basic sense serves to harmonize a diversity of perspectives, to relate the specific particularities of individual human experience through an authoritative narratival and structural collective assertion about what such particularities bear in common.

Significantly, Ellison espouses a Durkheimian understanding of the relationship between religion (expressed through rite and myth) and literature. Literary forms ritualize and give expression to the authoritative unity inherent in the social experience of autonomous and diverse individuals. The social function of the artist is to articulate such religious expressions and, in a typically Ellisonian move, the utility of such myths and rites serve both to distinguish his particular African American expression from the ancient and modern classics (James Joyce’s use of The Odyssey, as the basis for Ulysses [1922] for example) and to situate such an expression functionally as analogous to canonical literary methods and achievements.

For both Ellison and Durkheim, collective representations are not just shared symbols among individuals united by time and space—they serve as the construction of being, paying honor as a group to the sentiments that bind that group together. In this way Durkheim’s theoretical estimation of religion serves as a corollary to Ellison’s literary appropriations of ritual and myth as formally expressive of the universal orientation of particular experience. Human autonomy does not reside only in the particular self-interest of one’s identity but must also express an orientation beyond the limitations of time and space.

Clifford Geertz argues in The Interpretation of Cultures that “Man is to be defined neither by his innate capacities alone, as the Enlightenment sought to do, nor by his actual behaviors alone, as much of contemporary social science seeks to do, but rather by the link between them, the way in which the first is transformed into the second, his generic potentialities focused into his specific performances. . . . As culture shaped us as a single species . . . so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This, neither an unchanging subcultural self nor an established cross-cultural consensus, is what we really have in common” (52).

41 Schleiermacher’s theory of religion bears traces of Susanne Zantop’s “colonial fantasy” in ways that may prove problematic racially from a postcolonial perspective for some readers. I wish, again, to distinguish Zantop’s understanding of the universal from my own, which remains more provisional—neither elemental nor naturalized but a conceptual adjunct to particularity, no more “real” than race itself. For more expansive readings of the postcolonial limits of particulars and universals, see Chidester, Empire of Religion, and Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, among others. Thanks to J. Kameron Carter for pushing me on this point.

42 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 12, 14.

43 Jeffrey Stout also offers a naturalistic reading of Ellison in his chapter “Race and Nation in Baldwin and Ellison,” in Democracy and Tradition, 42–60. Here Ellison becomes a pragmatist, which in and of itself is not problematic, though Stout’s assessment comes off as heavy-handed. One wishes to ask Stout, as Ellison (with some measure of exasperation) did his interviewers from the Paris Review: “Look, didn’t you find [Invisible Man] at all funny?” See Ellison, “The Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 221.

44 Saunders, “Gospel according to Ralph,” 35–55.

45 Ibid., 36.

46 Ibid., 37, 39. “Religion” registers as basically synonymous with “Christianity” for Saunders.

47 Ibid., 48–51.

48 Two works on race, religion, and theology whose goals inspire this book are Carter’s Race and Jennings’s Christian Imagination. Both seek to recover and trace theological trajectories that have shaped the evolution of race as a conceptual and political aspect of modernity. Carter contends that “modernity’s racial imagination is religious in nature” (5), “animated by a deep theological imagination” (7) rooted in “Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots” (4). In service of this broader argument, he tacks back and forth between early Christian sources (Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) and African American ones (Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, James Cone, and others), locating older legacies in the political and cultural schematics of modern racism. Jennings argues that social and cultural divisions in contemporary theological inquiry stem both from “unfamiliarity with the deep theological architecture that patterned early modern visions of peoples, places, and societies.” Consequently, “Christian theology now operates inside this diseased social imagination without the ability to discern how its intellectual and pedagogical performances reflect and fuel the problem” (6–7). While symptoms may seem obvious to materialist interpretation, the limitations of such materialism are symptomatic of the very social disease it seeks to diagnose. To counter this problem, Jennings traces a broader historical and cosmopolitan genealogy of a “Christian imagination” from Gomes Eanes du Zurara to Olaudah Equiano to recent conceptions of Israel (as ancient biblical and contemporary political properties).

49 The invisibilities profiled here and in the conclusion remain representative of a much larger catalog of exemplars—many of which just missed the cut for inclusion. In addition to biblical sources, early modern contexts, American Puritanism, and indigenous African sources, we might consider Augustine’s invisible church, detailed in his City of God; Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” discussed especially in the essay “Nature”; the notion of “invisible religion” profiled in Luckmann’s sociological study Invisible Religion; Raboteau’s category of the “invisible institution” that characterizes religiosity among enslaved subjects, in Slave Religion; and, of course, an antecedent often overlooked by scholars: Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897).

50 West, “Ellison,” 245.

51 Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and Steve Cannon, “The Essential Ellison,” in Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 373. For more on the foundational nature of biblical language (especially as it is modeled on the King James Version), see also James Alan McPherson’s interview and overview from the Atlantic in Ellison, Collected Essays, 368–70.

52 Ellison, Collected Essays, 742. This represents a retrospective statement, and Ellison could be cagy about his past political identities (see Foley, Wrestling with the Left). Still, Ellison sets up a clear distinction between literary heroes (Dostoevsky and James) and the politically oriented writers he was supposed to read. Interestingly, this is a similar tension pursued in Invisible Man, which offers a clear critique of political action and the New York Left of the 1930s. Similarly, Ellison frequently discusses his aims for Invisible Man by citing Dostoevsky (see “The Art of Fiction,” for instance, from the mid-1950s [in Collected Essays, 212]).

53 “Invisible,” spelled “inuisible” in the Geneva Bible, appears a total of five times (in precisely the same places) in both the Geneva (1587) and King James Version (KJV, 1611) English translations: Romans 1:20, Colossians 1:15 and 16, 1 Timothy 1:17, and Hebrews 11:27, all of which are discussed in some detail above. Gutjahr (American Bible, 92) notes that Geneva was the primary English translation used by Protestants in colonial America through about 1640, at which point the KJV took over until the late nineteenth century, at least.

54 These and all biblical quotations cited in this volume come from the KJV.

55 Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 46.

56 Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, 49.

57 Ellison’s most trenchant critique of social scientific methods may be found in his review of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Ellison takes special issue with what one commentator calls “Myrdal’s sterile ‘scientific’ approach as inadequate to capture the mercurial forces of myth and history that under-gird power and race in America” (Purcell, Race, 51). Note the disjuncture between clinical “sterility” and the resurrection of myth (also Bultmann’s chosen term—“mercurial” itself is also a term derived from Roman myth) that marks Ellison’s approach as distinct. For Ellison’s review, see “An American Dilemma: A Review,” in Collected Essays, 328–40.

58 Ellison, Invisible Man, 8.

59 We find evidence of this demythologizing impulse in Alain Locke’s introduction to The New Negro, in which he depicts modern African American subjects who have moved away from the “myth” of the past, becoming in the process modern and increasingly secularized people with “idols of the tribe to smash.” This new outlook is “scientific,” not “sentimental” (4, 8).

60 W. Wesley Williams offers a helpful digest of debates concerning God’s (in)visibility in the Hebrew Bible over the past century. He suggests, citing Christi Dianne Bamford and Benyamin Uffenheimer, that such a view actually imposes Greek and later anxieties about corporeality upon the Hebrew Bible text. In fact, the more salient question is not whether one can but, in fact, if one may see God (Williams, Tajallī wa Ru’ya, 21–25).

61 In addition to different names for God (Yahweh, Elohim, etc.), we see evidence of a divine council in sources such as the book of Job. Not one god but a sense of plurality. See M. S. Smith, Early History of God.

62 See Gerstenberger, “Conflicting Theologies,” 120–34. He expands upon these typologies in Theologies. On this point, see esp. 19–24, though the entire volume discusses them in greater detail.

63 Hanson, “Israelite Religion,” 485.

64 Day, Yahweh, 233. See also Freedman, “‘Who Is Like Thee,” 334, which traces the submergence of El into Yahweh.

65 Bright, History of Israel, 438.

66 Geller, “God of the Covenant,” 286.

67 “Emergent Judaism” is Bright’s phrase (History of Israel, 438). For the diversity/singularity of God, see Geller, “God of the Covenant,” 286.

68 Brueggemann, Theology, 333.

69 Ellison, Invisible Man, 577.

70 Ibid.

71 Pluribus and unum also constitute a broader theme elsewhere in Ellison’s criticism—particularly for the democratic function of the novel, bringing together particulars and universals. See especially Senator Sunraider’s speech on the Senate floor in the second novel (Ellison, Three Days Before, 242) and the essays “Society, Morality, ” and “Novel as Function,” in Ellison, Collected Essays, 698–729, 759–69.

72 See, e.g., Elazar, Covenant and Polity.

73 Ellison, Invisible Man, 577.

74 Ibid., 581.

75 It is also important to recognize in exilic literature (and the postexilic literature that tells its story) a model for the development of Afro-America. New World Africans would resonate with biblical legacies of captivity, enslavement, and exile that unite—meaningfully, if not completely—culturally and politically diverse people, beliefs, and customs, forging a new and unique sense of theological identity. Such biblical legacies and identities proved familiar, appealing, and useful in the formation of African American identity in the midst of enslavement and exile.

76 Malik, Meaning of Race, 42. Malik’s reading, on which I draw, is admittedly counterintuitive and not without a measure of controversy. He argues, after a Niebuhrian fashion, that equality invents inequality: “I want to argue here the opposite to the common-sense view: that it is not racial differentiation that has led to the denial of equality but the social constraints placed on the scope of equality that has led to the racial categorisation of humanity. In other words, it is not ‘race’ that gives rise to inequality but inequality that gives rise to ‘race.’ The nature of modern society has created inequalities between different social groups and these have come to be preserved in racial terms. The ambiguous attitude to race . . . arises from an ambivalent attitude to equality” (39). Our present context understandably has little patience for the imperfections of liberalism’s often hypocritical propensity toward the inequitable. Indeed, it would be absurd to hold sixteenth- and seventeenth-century agents to twenty-first century expectations. On the cusp of modernity, however, we should remember how starkly radical even the prospect of equality would have been to people emerging from feudalism, whose world had expanded exponentially in the brief course of their own lifetimes. See especially Malik’s second chapter, “The Social Limits to Equality.”

77 Schreiner, “Appearances and Reality,” 346.

78 Ibid., 345. Cf. Harries, Infinity and Perspective.

79 Gerrish, Old Protestantism and New, draws a helpful distinction between two types of the deus absconditus in Luther’s theology—what he calls Hiddenness I and Hiddenness II. In Hiddenness I God is hidden within revelation, meaning that God is veiled yet in this act of concealing is simultaneously revealed. This category qualifies what Schreiner (“Appearances and Reality”) ascribes to Luther in her article. Hiddenness II is a trickier prospect involving God outside of revelation and thus is, problematically for many, outside of the Incarnation: “faith cannot rest in the God who is hidden beyond his revelation” (140). I would suggest that Shakespeare’s God, which Schreiner qualifies as “far away,” inhabits Gerrish’s Hiddenness II. The payoff here is that God’s hiddenness forms a conceptual antecedent that unites the problem of emerging modernity and Ellison’s later appropriation of race as invisibility—a metaphor for discussing it. Cf. Gerrish’s chapter 4, “‘To the Unknown God’” (131–49).

80 Schreiner, “Appearances and Reality,” 368.

81 Luther’s Hidden God draws in part on the passages in Exodus 33 we have treated above. Brueggemann, Theology, offers an overview on 333.

82 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

83 Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 698.

84 Ibid., 699.

85 Mather, Wonders, 203–51.

86 A transcript of Hutchinson’s trial appears in T. Hutchinson, History of the Colony, 509. For more on Hutchinson, the trial, and its context, see especially Battis, Saints and Sectaries; LaPlante, American Jezebel; and Winship, Times and Trials.

87 H. Stout, New England Soul, especially the first chapter, “The Institutional Setting of the Sermon,” 13–31.

88 Mather, Wonders, 71.

89 Ibid., 77.

90 Ellison, Invisible Man, 7.

91 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 386.

92 Ellison, Collected Essays, 750.

93 As with the other ways of looking at invisibility in this introduction, I focus narrowly on the Kongo, though one could, with a different agenda, explore more widely. Bockie’s Death and Invisible Powers remains the best and most thorough examination on the topic. Thanks to Marcus Harvey for directing me to Bockie.

94 Bockie, Death and Invisible Powers, ix.

95 Ibid., x.

96 Ibid., 1.

97 Ibid., 10.

98 Ibid., 18.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid., 33.

101 Returning to Schleiermacher, it is interesting to consider Bockie’s use of the word “dependency” in light of Schleiermacher’s denomination of religious essence as “being absolutely dependent” (Christian Faith, 12).

102 Bockie, Death and Invisible Powers, 36; see also 40.

103 Ibid., 40.

104 Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 194.

105 Ibid. See Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic. Fields and Fields use Evans-Pritchard to evince what they call “racecraft” in the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah.

106 Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 195.

107 For more on the distinctions between “good” and “bad” theology or religion, see Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 171.

Chapter 1. From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse

1 For more on Ellison’s chance meeting with Locke and Hughes, see L. Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 163–64. Rampersad recounts it in his biography of Ellison (Ralph Ellison, 82), and in his biography of Hughes (Life of Langston Hughes, 1:329). Jackson says the day is July 5; Rampersad claims July 6.

2 Langston Hughes, “Goodbye Christ,” in his Collected Poems, 166. For more on the poem and its legacy, see Best, “Concerning ‘Goodbye Christ.’”

3 Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” 621.

4 There is overlap here with Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling, which addresses three aspects of migration: movement, relation, and position (5). Relationality applies especially to Ellison’s account, as a new migrant, of trying to contextualize the people he met on the street.

5 Rosengarten, Henry Fielding, 30.

6 Jennings, Christian Imagination, 6; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 6.

7 See Adero, Up South; Goodwin, Black Migration; Gregory, Southern Diaspora; Grossman, Land of Hope; Harrison, Black Exodus; Marks, Farewell; Trotter, Great Migration.

8 A. Locke, New Negro. The Harlem Renaissance, of course, was no monolithic entity. Rather, the term groups various cultural phenomena and practitioners into a cohesive, albeit artificial, unit.

9 US Census Bureau, “Race and Hispanic Origin.”

10 See Bone and Courage, Muse in Bronzeville; Hine and McCluskey, Black Chicago Renaissance; Mullen, Popular Fronts; and Tracy, Writers of Black Chicago. For a “Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives,” please see the homepage for the Mapping the Stacks project, http://mts.lib.uchicago.edu.

11 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 8–11. During a similar period in New York, African Americans jumped from 1.8 percent of the total city population in 1890 to 9.5 percent by 1950.

12 Weisenfeld also considers the cultural implications of these dynamic changes in Hollywood Be Thy Name; see especially her introduction. It is difficult to imagine the experiences of the new migrants from Mississippi or other neighboring states when they disembarked from the train in Chicago or Harlem. One anecdote from a train porter in Chicago suggests that migrants just off the train would ask redcaps to direct them to a friend or relative’s house by name only, “unaware that without an address the porter could be of little help in a city as huge as Chicago” (Spear, Black Chicago, 147).

13 Hunter, Before Novels, 112.

14 Ibid., 44–47.

15 S. Johnson, Samuel Johnson, 420.

16 Ibid., 178.

17 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 10–11.

18 McKeon, Origins of English Novel, 419.

19 Richardson, Pamela.

20 Fielding, Tom Jones, 637.

21 Campbell, “Fielding and the Novel,” 107.

22 Fielding, Shamela, 80. The italics appear in the text.

23 Campbell quotes Johnson as stating that the difference between Richardson and Fielding was “as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate” (“Fielding and the Novel,” 111).

24 Campbell notes that readers who favor Fielding “have argued that in his choice of external characterization [depicting characters as they are observed outside of themselves, not as they see themselves] reflects not the superficiality of his vision, but the profundity of his philosophical recognition that in life itself, other people’s characters are always only experienced through external and often misleading evidence,” which contributes to Fielding’s own mode of verisimilar representation (ibid., 111).

25 Richardson, Pamela, 242.

26 Fielding, Shamela, 27.

27 While I speak primarily of (Protestant) Christian churches here, this dearth of religions in The New Negro occludes a much broader diversity of religious beliefs and practices at play in Harlem during the early twentieth century.

28 See Sernett, Bound for Promised Land and Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming.

29 A. Locke, New Negro 3. To be fair, there are two ways in which one may find the situation not entirely as simple as I depict it here—one of these I shall address presently and the other I simply wish to name. First, The New Negro contains James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation,” which is based on the old-time Negro sermonic form, and which Johnson would publish as part of God’s Trombones in 1927. Second, a certain historicism in The New Negro addresses, for example, the spirituals and other folk practices that are intrinsic in more contemporary understandings of non-Christian and/or syncretistic belief systems that were not then fully recognized as religious per se (voodoo, for instance). The New Negro authors treat them in decidedly “secularized” ways, failing to recognize with any real insight the religious nature of such cultural phenomena beyond their role as metaphysical and superstitious relics of bygone days.

30 Ibid., 4, 8.

31 Ibid., 8.

32 Ibid., 15.

33 Ibid., 16. See John Locke’s treatise The Reasonableness of Christianity, first published in 1695, which likewise modernizes certain “irrational” elements of Christianity—including miracles and other supernatural beings and phenomena.

34 See Larson, Summer for the Gods.

35 See Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker’s essays on Hurston collected in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Mary Helen Washington’s foreword to the 1990 edition of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God gives a good background of the re-emergence of the text at the 1979 Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco (vii–xiv).

36 Delbanco, “Political Incorrectness,” 103–8.

37 Carpio and Sollors (“Newly Complicated”) highlight the recent discovery of three short stories that, they purport, add nuance to Hurston’s work and biography—rendering her “cosmic Zora.” While I agree with the assessment of Hurston’s complexity, evidenced in the forthcoming discussion of Hurston, I remain unsure of whether these discoveries necessarily seal that identity in the way that Carpio and Sollors suggest.

38 Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 90–91. Hurston is alleged to be the only female student who ever truly impressed Alain Locke, whose misogyny was legendary at Howard University. He was rumored to tell his female students on the first day of class that it would be nearly impossible for them to score better than a C from him.

39 Ibid., 115.

40 Hurston discusses Boas, objectivity, and relates her early attempts at fieldwork in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road; see esp. 143–45.

41 The most striking example is John Pearson’s climactic final sermon in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which comes almost wholesale from a sermon by C. C. Lovelace that Hurston transcribed in Eau Galle, Florida, in May 1929. See Hurston, Sanctified Church, 95–102. Indeed, it is fair to say that the immaturity of craft in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston’s first novel) resides in no small part in Hurston’s inability to transform the raw data of her fieldwork into a cohesive literary statement.

42 Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 256–59.

43 Margaret Wallace, review of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, first published in New York Times, May 6, 1934, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 8–9.

44 Andrew Burris, review of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, first published in Crisis, June 3, 1934, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 6.

45 Ibid., 7.

46 Ibid., 6–7.

47 See L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 76, and Rowley, Richard Wright, 137–38.

48 Alain Locke, review of Their Eyes, first published in Opportunity, June 1, 1938, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 18.

49 Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” 22–23. Hurston’s first biographer, Robert Hemenway, offers an important caveat for reading Wright’s review of Hurston in “Between Laughter and Tears”: “Wright’s conception of folkloric fiction was more complicated than his review suggests,” pointing the reader to Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 244–45n30).

50 Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge (December 1937), reprinted in Patton and Honey, Double-Take, 53.

51 Interestingly, just before Hurston’s resurgence in the late 1970s, June Jordan sought to harmonize the division between Wright and Hurston, perhaps less to offer a synthetic reading and more to unify divergences in the African American literary tradition. See Jordan, “On Richard Wright,” 4–10. Conversely, Rowley makes this pithy observation (which bears unfortunately unrealized elaboration) in her treatment of the disputes between Wright and Hurston over the nature and representation of race in the United States: “The Hurston-Wright controversy continues to this day” (Richard Wright, 138). Scholars have recently (see Carpio and Sollors, “Newly Complicated”) sought to take issue with the Hurston-Wright dualism, though whatever justification they may ultimately conceive will face tremendous odds of undoing the divide in the face of the material I cite both here and above. It remains a stubborn myth.

52 Ellison, “Recent Negro Fiction,” 24.

53 Ibid., 26.

54 Ibid., 24.

55 There can be no doubt that Hurston’s gender is ineluctably related to her artistic rejection by Locke, Wright, and Ellison, all of whose biographies (for diverse reasons) bear strong misogynistic tendencies.

56 Hurston, Their Eyes, 183.

57 Job’s misfortune is made all the more perverse by the fact that, unbeknownst to him, the calamities he confronts stem from a wager between God and Satan. Thus, when God refuses to justify Godself to Job, there emerges a real sense that there is no humanly acceptable justification that God can offer—even if God would.

58 Job 38:2, 4–5 (KJV).

59 Hurston, Their Eyes, 150.

60 Ibid., 151.

61 Another interesting aspect of the correspondences between Their Eyes and Job is the way that the book of Job itself ends “happily” (with his wife, children, and fortune restored—though biblical scholars suspect that this restitution represents a later edition of the text). Hurston does not allow Janie this same comfort, and we may see a kind of reversal of Nahum Tate’s comedic vision of King Lear, the end of which sees Lear and Cordelia live happily into old age. Samuel Johnson favored this version of Lear as it offers just representations of general nature (Samuel Johnson, 463–65). Like Pamela, Job’s virtue is rewarded (if in an equally disconcerting manner). How, though, may we understand Janie’s virtue to be rewarded? Bigger Thomas’s reward, as we shall see, is martyrdom for the materialist cause.

62 Zora Neale Hurston, review of Uncle Tom’s Children, first published in Saturday Review of Literature, April 2, 1938, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Richard Wright, 3.

63 Ibid., 4.

64 Ibid.

65 She writes in a letter to William Bradford Huie, himself something of a sensationalist, regarding the case of Ruby McCollum, who was accused of killing her lover—a white doctor—in 1952: “No matter what the Emancipation Proclamation says, we are still slaves in spirit, lousy with inferiority complex, and . . . see glory in [killing white people]. The success of . . . NATIVE SON [among others] . . . was due to this angle.” Hurston covered the McCollum trial for the Pittsburgh Courier (Kaplan, Life in Letters, 719).

66 One interesting parallel that avoids association with slavery comes from the Nation of Islam—an urban religious group founded in the early 1930s in the midst of the Great Migration and thus a product of this same era in the wake of the renaissance movements. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s dietary guidelines discourage “slave food” diets (including what we commonly think of as “soul food”) while promoting foods not associated with slavery. See Curtis, Black Muslim Religion, 98–101.

67 Remember that the southern campaign did not flummox Martin Luther King Jr. and the broader freedom movements nearly as much as Chicago’s did. See Branch’s three-volume history chronicling “America in the King Years,” Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. Of Chicago, King said, “I have never in my life seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or in Alabama. This is a terrible thing” (Branch, Canaan’s Edge, 511). As Branch later summarizes, “The violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners, treatable by enlightened but firm instruction” (ibid., 522).

68 Ellison, Invisible Man, 499.

69 Ellison, “Extravagance of Laughter,” in Collected Essays, 616.

70 Warren (What Was) argues that “African American literature” in fact relied upon a segregated social order in order to be defined as such.

71 There’s a corollary in Invisible Man—young Emerson—who expresses clear disgust at his father’s racial politics (as a benefactor of the protagonist’s college for Negroes and an advisor to Bledsoe), and he both reveals Bledsoe’s deception to the protagonist and expresses the desire to help him: “you mustn’t believe that I’m against you . . . or your race. I’m your friend” (189). The protagonist, however, remains leery of him, and the reader suspects—even if the protagonist cannot express such a suspicion consciously—that the compulsion to help may derive as much from young Emerson’s own homoerotic desire for the protagonist as it does from well-meaning (if obsequious) white guilt: “Perhaps you’d like to be my valet?” (192).

72 Wright, Native Son, 66.

73 This brief episode also illustrates the impetus behind Ralph Ellison’s claim that “[Richard] Wright could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright. Wright saw to that” (Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Collected Essays, 162).

74 Wright, Native Son, 74.

75 Ibid., 66–67.

76 Ibid., 425, 426; emphasis in the original.

77 Ibid., 426–27, 429.

78 Ibid. There are interesting corollaries here between Max’s silencing of Bigger’s attempts at an individual articulation of motive and the Brotherhood’s responses to the protagonist’s going off script in his public speaking appearances in Invisible Man.

79 Ibid.

80 Carpio and Sollers, “Newly Complicated.”

81 Hurston, “Monkey Junk.”

82 Ibid.

83 Foley (Wrestling with the Left) takes issue with this reading in an important counternarrative that I don’t necessarily endorse, but that provides interesting inflections for my apocalyptic reading here.

84 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 452.

85 See especially L. P. Jackson, “Birth of the Critic,” 321–55. Rampersad (Ralph Ellison), Rowley (Richard Wright), and L. P. Jackson’s Emergence of Genius and Indignant Generation also provide insight, in addition to Ellison’s “The World and the Jug” (in Collected Essays, 155–88), “Richard Wright’s Blues” (128–44), and “Remembering Richard Wright” (659–75).

86 Ellison, Collected Essays, 57.

87 Ellison, Invisible Man, 17.

88 Ibid., 17–18.

89 Ibid., 29.

90 Two versions of this address may be found in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers. A manuscript version begins on 578, and the version printed in the press begins on 583.

91 A. Locke, New Negro, vii, 3. Ellison makes the rhetorical association with Locke in the introduction to Shadow and Act by invoking “an older generation of Negro leaders and writers—those of the so-called ‘Negro Renaissance’” (Ellison, Collected Essays, 57; emphasis mine).

92 A. Locke, New Negro, 47–48, 50, 52, 39, 342.

93 Carpio and Sollors (“Newly Complicated”) note that Hurston sided with Booker T. Washington over Du Bois.

94 Ellison, Invisible Man, 172–79, 262–67.

95 Ellison, Collected Essays, 441. Ellison’s italics signal his next move: “I stress American culture because I think we are in a great deal of confusion over our role in the creation of American culture. It is so easy to become unknowingly racist by simply stressing one part of our heritage, thus reducing the complexity of our cultural heritage to a generic reality which is only partially dealt with” (441).

96 Ibid., 442.

97 Ibid., 446. See also 444 for similar examples.

98 Ibid., 447.

99 Ibid.

100 Ellison, Invisible Man, 16.

101 Ibid., 36. W. E. B. DuBois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view its deep recessed,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (1–2).

102 Ellison, Invisible Man, 267–84.

103 Conner writes of the “things” in Invisible Man: “These objects . . . are not merely material. [They] do not simply exist in present time and space; rather, they are portals to a larger concept of time, history, and identity than is otherwise available to the Invisible Man. In short, they are sacramental: visible and material signs for the invisible and immaterial realm beyond” (Conner, “Litany of Things,” 171).

104 Montgomery, Apocalypse, 40.

105 Leigh, Apocalyptic Patterns, 192.

106 Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 699–700.

107 Apocalypticism remains one of the more popular and, concurrently, lesser understood biblical genres. Scholars have devised a rigid definition and criteria for nominating a text as an apocalypse. The standard definition, first published in the journal Semeia (and popularly referred to as the “Semeia 14” definition), specifies apocalypse as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world” (Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 4–5). A later addition notes that it usually emerges from an embattled community (ibid., 41).

108 Ellison, Invisible Man, 32; hereafter cited in the text by page number.

109 Rev. 6:1–8 (KJV).

110 Consider, too, that Invisible Man was published exactly one week after Reinhold Niebuhr’s Irony of American History, which deals with the broader implications of the atomic bomb.

111 J. H. Cone, Spirituals and the Blues.

Chapter 2. 1952

1 Warren, So Black and Blue, 23.

2 See Morris, “World Below”; Webster, “Inside a Dark Shell”; and Hedden, “Objectively Vivid.” See also L. P. Jackson’s summary of Invisible Man’s critical reception in Indignant Generation, 355–61.

3 Warren, So Black and Blue, 3.

4 Ellison’s civil rights legacy is complex. By the most simple of measures, other activists were (and in some cases remain) quick to note that he didn’t march (unlike Baldwin and even Nathan Scott). He did maintain a healthy skepticism regarding (if no small admiration for) Martin Luther King (which he shared with Scott; see chapter 3). See chapter 4 for a more constructive and nuanced argument about the impact of the civil rights era, its freedom movements and attendant anxieties on Ellison and his work—particularly in the unfinished second novel. For more information on Baldwin’s issues with protest literature, see Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin, No One Knows, 13–23.

5 Baker, “Black Boys,” 63–64.

6 Ellison, “World and the Jug,” in Collected Essays, 188. Wellington, “Fighting at Cross-Purposes,” 101–6, notes perceptively that when a reader steeped in Ellison’s essay turns to Howe’s less-known instigative work for the first time, Ellison’s ire comes off as excessive.

7 Ellison, Collected Essays, 172.

8 Niebuhr, like Ellison, flirted with communism as a younger man, yet came to reject the broader practices and ideologies of the Communist Party for reasons similar to Ellison’s—especially what both men perceived as the party’s denigration of the individual and reliance upon social scientific data to address human problems, which, for Ellison and Niebuhr, were inadequate.

9 L. Jackson places Ellison in an intellectual lineage of “new liberals” that points especially to Niebuhr’s legacy (Ralph Ellison, 403). Jesse Wolfe has written comparatively about Ellison and Niebuhr, but he relies more on their political connection than the appropriateness of Niebuhr’s theology to a common understanding between them (“‘Ambivalent Man,’” 621–38). Ellison would have been aware of Niebuhr by the 1940s, at the latest, when Niebuhr was famous enough to appear on the cover of Time (March 8, 1948). It is most likely that Niebuhr first learned of Ellison through the publicity generated by Invisible Man’s success. The most tangible personal connection between Ellison and Niebuhr was Nathan Scott, who probably mentioned Ellison on occasion to Niebuhr. Responding to a letter from Scott in which he mentions nominating Ellison for the Reinhold Niebuhr Memorial Prize in 1972, Niebuhr’s widow, Ursula Niebuhr, appears to know of Ellison and to approve of his Niebuhrian bonafides (see Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, box 51, folder 21).

10 See Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, esp. 167–223.

11 The second series of Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh (which would become The Nature and Destiny of Man) were in fact delivered as that city was bombed during the Blitz (ibid., 191).

12 Gilkey, On Niebuhr, 13.

13 Ibid.

14 R. Niebuhr, Faith and History, 12.

15 Ibid., 20.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 22–23.

18 Ibid., 9.

19 Ellison, Invisible Man, 6. Note the phrase “darkness of lightness,” which resonates with another of Reinhold Niebuhr’s works—Children of Light, Children of Darkness—concerned with the impossibility of utopia, promoting democracy as the best system conceived by mere humans in a state of fallenness.

20 R. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 1–2.

21 Ibid., 2.

22 Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 4.

23 Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 67–73, discusses a fascinating 1970 exchange between Ellison and a Mr. S. D. Claghorn, who wrote to Ellison in response to the author’s “What Would America Be Like without Blacks?,” published in Time magazine (see Ellison, Collected Essays, 577–84). Claghorn’s letter contains a fairly standard racist screed; Ellison’s devastating response speaks volumes about Ellison’s basic assumptions about race, and his own place within its American context: “My response is simple,” Ellison writes in a letter he appears not to have mailed. “I am quite willing to admit that I am inferior if you are willing to admit that I wrote Invisible Man” (72).

24 See, for instance, Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 439–40.

25 Ellison, Invisible Man, xviii.

26 Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Collected Essays, 143.

27 Ibid., 129.

28 Ellison, Invisible Man, 54–55.

29 The dream itself, which out of necessity I only gloss here, is remarkable in its own right and worthy of deeper engagement. See especially Baker’s Freudian analysis in Blues, Ideology, 173–99.

30 Ellison, Invisible Man, 59.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 59–60.

33 Ibid., 60.

34 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 1.

35 Ellison perhaps understates or willfully misremembers how extreme circumstances were in the Oklahoma of his youth. As Rampersad discusses, eight-year-old Ralph and his family passed through Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood shortly before race riots destroyed it in May 1921, killing sixty-eight African Americans, nine whites, and leaving roughly nine thousand people homeless or otherwise dislocated (Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 20–21, 24). See also L. Jackson, Emergence of Genius, 36–38.

36 Ellison, “Going to the Territory,” in Collected Essays, 603.

37 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15; Ellison, Invisible Man, 593.

38 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 3.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 9.

41 Ibid., 13.

42 See Pope, Halfway Covenant.

43 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 14.

44 Ibid., 15.

45 See Mullen, Popular Fronts, and Finkle, Forum for Protest.

46 See, for instance, Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare.

47 Rowley, Richard Wright, esp. 330–73; Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes.

48 L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 304.

49 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15.

50 Ellison, Invisible Man, 29; A. Locke, New Negro, vii, 3.

51 Ellison, Invisible Man, 15.

52 Ibid., 16.

53 Ibid., 147. See also the grandfather’s appearances on 32–33, 40, 170, 186, 315, 335, 354, 378–81, 384, 390, 462, 508, 556, 574–75, 580.

54 The college’s founder is distinguished from Booker T. Washington in the protagonist’s initial interview with the Brotherhood (see esp. 305–7). Bledsoe, of course, like the grandfather and most figures of authority in Invisible Man, is not what he seems. His appearance belies his reality.

55 Ellison, Invisible Man, 117–35.

56 Ibid., 134.

57 See Nadel’s chapter “Invisible Man in the Golden Day” for a thorough explication of this establishment’s symbolic resonances (Invisible Criticism, 85–103).

58 Ellison, Invisible Man, 73.

59 In this way we also inaugurate a more complicated sense of intertextuality between Ellison’s man underground and two antecedents that must remain merely acknowledged and set aside for the time being: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground.” For more on Dostoevsky, see Lyne, “Signifying Modernist,” 318–30. For more on Ellison, Wright, and “The Man Who Lived Underground,” see Bakish, “Underground,” 18–23; Goede, “On Lower Frequencies,” 483–501; and Ridenour, “‘Man Who Lived Underground,’” 54–57.

60 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 3.

61 Ellison, Invisible Man, 571; Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15.

62 Ellison, Invisible Man, 571, 573.

63 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15.

64 Ibid., 15.

65 Tillich, On the Boundary, 13.

66 Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, xiv.

67 See K. G. Jackson, “Books in Brief,” 105.

68 Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, 61.

69 See M. K. Taylor, “The Theological Development and Contribution of Paul Tillich,” introduction to his Theologian of the Boundaries, 21–24.

70 Tillich, Theology of Culture, 3–9.

71 Ibid., 9.

72 For more on Tillich and Barth’s relationship, see Mehta, New Theologian, esp. chapter 1, “Ecce Homo,” 1–66. Fox details strong disagreements between Tillich and Niebuhr, an account with which Gilkey takes issue in Gilkey on Tillich (204n4).

73 See M. K. Taylor, Paul Tillich, 21–22. Tillich would later teach at Harvard and Chicago.

74 Ellison was certainly aware of Tillich as early as December 1952, when Lawrence Jackson places him in attendance at a series of lectures in Princeton in which Tillich participated (Emergence of Genius, 441).

75 The distinction here from Schleiermacher’s “religion” should be emphasized even as I draw these definitions parallel to, or in correspondence with, one another.

76 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3.

77 Ibid., 12, 14; italics in original.

78 See Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness.

79 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 11.

80 Ellison, Collected Essays, 212.

81 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 13.

82 Ibid. This represents the third of Tillich’s three possible relations between preliminary and ultimate concern.

83 Tillich, Courage to Be, 3.

84 Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, 103.

85 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

86 Tillich, Courage to Be, 155; Ellison, Invisible Man, 4.

87 Tillich, Courage to Be, 175, 176.

88 Ellison, Invisible Man, 564, 565.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., 576.

91 Ibid., 568.

92 Ibid., 569; italics in original.

93 Ibid., 570; italics in original.

94 Ibid., 577.

Chapter 3. Above the Veil

1 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6.

2 Ibid.

3 Kenneth Burke writes, “We are to be concerned with the analogy between ‘words’ (lower case) and The Word (Logos, Verbum) as it were in caps. ‘Words’ in the first sense have wholly naturalistic, empirical reference. But they may be used analogically, to designate a further dimension, the ‘supernatural.’ Whether or not there is a realm of the ‘supernatural,’ there are words for it. And in this state of linguistic affairs is a paradox.” Ordinary words may be used to describe the supernatural, and in doing so they take on supernatural significance, whereupon “we can borrow back the terms from the borrower, again secularizing to varying degrees the originally secular terms that had been given ‘supernatural’ connotations.” (Rhetoric of Religion, 7). For more on Ellison and Burke, see Eddy, Rites of Identity, and Crable, Ellison and Burke.

4 Scott, “Black Literature,” 295–96.

5 Ibid., 297–98. Scott applies this quotation, from Cleanth Brooks’s essay “Irony as a Principle of Structure” to Ellison and James Baldwin alike.

6 Scott resurrects agape in a later valedictory essay, “Ellison’s Vision of Communitas,” 312.

7 Rampersad and John Wright, as best I can determine, were the first critics to take seriously the Ellison/Scott connection in print, though as we shall see it proves abundantly clear that Scott’s students and colleagues were very much aware of the connection. See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, and Wright, Shadowing Ralph Ellison, esp. 167–71.

8 Around 1970 Scott turned to Heidegger as a way of flanking criticism against the limitations of his Tillichian worldview.

9 See Gunn, “Nathan Scott,” 104.

10 An oft-repeated anecdote Scott used to signal what he felt to be his intellectual marginality to his institutional home at the University of Chicago Divinity School (at least in the opinion of certain colleagues) is a friend’s remark that religion and literature are the “salad and dessert” of the curriculum—nice to set things up and finish them, but far from the substance of the matter (Scott, “Ramble on a Road,” 205–6).

11 A good biographical account, one on which my narrative here relies, may be found in the introduction to Buhrman’s Nathan Scott’s Literary Criticism.

12 Wood, “Interview,” 215.

13 Wright, Shadowing Ralph Ellison, 168, 169.

14 Wood, “Interview,” 226.

15 See Brittain, “Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,” 116.

16 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 381–82. Scott also sought to secure a more permanent post for Ellison at Chicago. See Ellison Papers part I, box 67, folder 9 for ongoing correspondence between Fanny Ellison and Charlotte Scott.

17 Scott, “Ramble on a Road,” 211. Interestingly, this formulation, “late, bad time,” appears in an essay title Scott devised and suggested upon inviting Gwendolyn Brooks to submit an essay for The Dark Tower—the volume Scott intended to coedit with Ellison: “I am the one who is responsible for the formulation ‘The Poet’s Aspiration in a Late, Bad Time.’ And it is meant only to be prompting and evocative” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6). Interestingly, it would become something of a catchphrase for Scott, closely identified with him. In the late 1970s, for instance, Robert Hayden offhandedly attributes the phrase to Scott in an interview, and it appears in several other sources, cited later in this chapter (Hayden, Collected Prose, 197).

18 Scott mentions this evening in an undated note to Ellison affixed to an offprint of his article “The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith,” Anglican Theological Review (January 1963). The note reads: “Many months ago you and Dick Stern were at our house one night—and the two of you in the course of the evening’s conversation were flatly asserting that Christianity and tragedy represent utterly antithetical principles. Well, there were too many other people present that night for me to attempt the kind of measured reply that I wanted to make. But here it is” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6).

19 A note from Divinity School student Herman Cole suggests that, in his Wednesday lunch talk, Ellison should speak on “How you as a novelist deals [sic] with religious themes in your work” (see Ellison Papers, part I, box 93, folder 4). Rampersad (Ralph Ellison, 393–94) notes that other early supporters of the Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture included Paul Tillich, Louis Kahn, Joseph Campbell, and W. H. Auden. Interestingly, the society’s founder, Marvin Halverson, supported Ellison’s application for membership to Manhattan’s exclusive Century Club at roughly the same time he enlisted Ellison (perhaps through or at Nathan Scott’s suggestion) to this board. Ellison’s Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture materials may be found in Ellison Papers, part 1, box 93, folder 6.

20 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67 folder 6. Doubleday expressed interest in publishing the project. An intriguing prospective author was Martin Luther King Jr., who does not appear to have been invited, but was included on what is probably an early (though undated) list of prospective people to contact (part I, box 67, folder 9). While a number of manuscripts were collected (Scott claims in late July 1963 to have contributions in hand from Harding, Long, and four others), the volume never appeared, and I can find no trace of what happened to it. None of the Ellison biographies mention the book. Charles Long, who may be the lone surviving contributor, remembers the book but claims no knowledge or memory of what happened to it (personal e-mail, October 14, 2014). One gets the sense, reading though the correspondence, that Scott did the lion’s share of the work and grew frustrated with Ellison’s distractedness, but there is no specific mention of the book falling through.

21 Ellison Papers, part I, box 94, folder 6.

22 Ellison Papers, part I, box 195, folder 10. Ellison joked in a letter dated April 17, 1963, that “You [Scott] write and publish so frequently that this really should be a blanket thank you note” for essays on Beckett, tragedy, and Camus (part II, box 33, folder 1).

23 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7.

24 Ibid.

25 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 8.

26 Conversation with Anthony C. Yu; Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 566.

27 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Charles Wesley (but not John Wesley) preached on nearby St. Simons Island in the 1730s. In this draft Ellison calls it “Ossawba Island” and refers to Scott’s book as A Wild Prayer of Yearning—interesting mistakes, and one wonders whether they found correction.

28 Here Ellison refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s volume The Phenomenon of Man (1955; published in English in 1959, around the time Ellison would have encountered it).

29 See Fikes, “Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,” 10–12. For the estimate of essays and articles, see Schlueter, “Tribute to Scott,” 461.

30 Tillich famously writes, “Religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (Theology of Culture, 42). Around 1966, Scott spoke of his research and teaching as focused on a “theological horizon” that proves “centrally important . . . in the literary landscape of our period. I have . . . become convinced not only that the literature of this century does itself most emphatically initiate theological inquiry but also that Christian theology, as a result of its dialogue with the literary imagination, will find itself more richly repaid (in terms of deepened awareness both of itself and of the age) than by way of any other similar transaction into which it may enter” (“Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,” Criterion, 30).

31 Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves.

32 Ellison Papers, part I, box 17, folder 7.

33 Yu, “Enduring Lessons,” 97–98. Scott called Yu one of his “closest and dearest friends.” See Scott, “Tribute to Yu,” 20–21. Yu’s introduction to the Nathan Scott festschrift he coedited with Mary Gerhart is also remarkable in its clarity and comprehensiveness. See “Nathan A. Scott, Jr., an Appreciation,” in Gerhart and Yu, Morphologies of Faith, xi–xxix.

34 Wood, “Interview,” 213.

35 Long, “I Remember Nathan,” 92. As best I can discern, Long does not designate his colleague’s racial identity.

36 Note the resonance of this complaint with similar ones about Ellison. Scott could be notoriously difficult, and while—like Charles Long’s colleague—he held little patience for certain performances of blackness, few of his students seem unscathed by the experience of working with him. My own sense of the 2008 “Wildcard” session that memorialized Scott at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago (which I attended) is that the speakers’ tones were in equal measure a tribute (to an admired, if enigmatic, teacher) and a support group for some common trauma they all had endured.

37 Scott, “Ramble on a Road,” 206.

38 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 9.

39 Connor, “Introduction to ‘Mystic Chords,’” 87, 90.

40 Yu, “Enduring Lessons,” esp. 93–94.

41 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7.

42 Ibid.

43 See Rankine’s study of Ellison and classicism, Ulysses in Black, and Cook and Tatum’s African American Writers. Concerning the cultural divide, see Chinitz, T. S. Eliot.

44 Long writes, “[Scott] would have surprised many with his knowledge of black music, (he once gave me a short biographical lecture on Fats Waller). . . . He formed a part of a community brought together by Brown’s barbershop. Brown’s barbershop was owned by ‘Brown,’ a black man and the shop had become a place for community discussion and debate about events of the day. When this barbershop was threatened by ‘urban development,’ Nathan became an active part of a committee that helped to keep the barbershop in the community as one of its vital assets” (“I Remember Nathan,” 92).

45 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6.

46 Ibid. He continues, “Who would ever have thought a few short years ago that niggers could raise so much sand?” Here we see rare evidence of Scott in a vernacular mode, in keeping with Ellison’s correspondence with Murray, for instance.

47 Ibid.

48 Yu, “Enduring Lessons,” 97. See the photo as part of a posthumous tribute to Scott in “Tributes to Nathan Scott: 1925–2006,” 21. Selma bore special significance for Scott, whose father graduated from Selma University (See Wood, “Interview,” 214). For Scott’s comparison of Ellison and King, see Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7.

49 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 See Scott, Albert Camus; Forms of Extremity; and Craters of the Spirit.

53 Scott, Craters of the Spirit, 90.

54 Ibid., 131.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 132, 133.

57 Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” 297–98. King also mentions Luther, Jefferson, Bunyan, and others.

58 See, in addition to Augustine’s City of God, Sheldrake, Spiritual City.

59 Scott, Craters of the Spirit, 90.

60 Medine, “Nathan A. Scott, Jr,” 124.

61 See Ellison, “The Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays.

62 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 23.

63 See, for instance, “Richard Wright’s Blues” and “World and the Jug” (both in Collected Essays), among others. Ellison and Wright’s mutual regard had waned considerably long before Wright’s death in 1960. For a clear and nuanced account of their friendship, see esp. L. P. Jackson, “Birth of the Critic,” 321–55.

64 This need not become a totalizing claim. One could, for instance, turn to Albert Murray, his concern with the blues and “Omni-American” identities, rather than Scott. My larger point is that Scott provides a key for interpreting a powerful trajectory in Ellison’s life post–1960.

65 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6.

66 It remains puzzling that the two major commentators on Ellison and Burke (meaning Eddy, Rites of Identity, and Crable, Ellison and Burke) essentially ignore Burke’s Rhetoric of Religion.

Chapter 4. Wrestling Proteus in the New Dispensation

1 See “Letter to Sprague,” in Ellison, “‘American Culture,” 34–49.

2 Warren, What Was?, 1.

3 Ibid., 2.

4 See Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress.

5 Delbanco, “Political Incorrectness,” 103–8.

6 Hurston, Folklore, Memoirs, 958.

7 Ibid., 956.

8 She suggests, for instance, that Brown represents a “trial-balloon” for abolishing democracy in favor of “Govt by administrative decree” (ibid., 957).

9 Ibid., 958.

10 Carpio and Sollors, “Newly Complicated.”

11 There is resonance here with the protagonist’s grandfather in Invisible Man. He is presumed to be quiet, but on his deathbed reveals himself as “a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 16).

12 Ellison Papers, part I, box 19, folder 3.

13 Ibid.

14 Payne, “‘Whole United States,’” 83. See also Ogletree, All Deliberate Speed, and Patterson, Brown v. Board.

15 Allen, Talking to Strangers, 5.

16 Ibid., 7, 8.

17 Sarah Imhoff offers a strong reminder of why allegedly landmark court cases should not be accorded too much significance in interpreting history. See “The Creation Story.”

18 See Woodward’s introduction and his first chapter, “Of Old Regimes and Reconstructions,” in Strange Career, 11–29.

19 See Paris, Black Leaders. J. H. Cone (Malcolm and Martin) addresses some of the coherences between the two major figures and highlights how they even came to occupy reflexively inverse positions at the times of their respective assassinations. C. W. Cone (Identity Crisis) highlights a number of ideological inconsistencies and points of contention in the establishment of a coherent system of black theology.

20 Bradley dates the origin of the second novel to before Invisible Man’s publication, claiming it was likely begun in 1950 or 1951. He notes that Ellison’s final “save” of revised materials on his computer dates to December 30, 1993 (Ralph Ellison in Progress, 22, 214).

21 See chapters 17 and 18 in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison.

22 Kenneth Warren asks of Invisible Man: “What might it mean to regard Ellison not as a writer for the ages but rather as simply an extraordinary writer for the particular era in which he lived a good portion of his life—the roughly six decades of a legally Jim Crow society?” (So Black and Blue, 2).

23 Haygood, “Invisible Manuscript.” One possible explanation for Ellison’s logorrhea may stem from his 1982 move from composing on a typewriter (or in longhand) to writing on a computer and its impact on his rituals of writing (and rewriting—see Bradley’s first chapter, titled “1982”): “[He] became seduced by the new machine, by the way he could move paragraphs up and down the screen, insert new words and delete old ones instantaneously. As he transferred his earlier work to the new medium, the words exploded. The shifting and shaping of his second novel became a kind of mania. . . . He seemed like a man dizzied by technology, a NASA operator in the control room thrilled by the machinery who lost sight of the mission, of the rockets aloft” (ibid.). In Ellison’s case these rockets represent the trajectory of his second novel.

24 In David Remnick’s New Yorker article “Visible Man,” published March 14, 1994—roughly a month before Ellison’s death on April 16—Ellison remarks, “‘Letting go of the book is difficult, because I’m so uncertain. I want it to be of quality’” (qtd. in Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 395).

25 Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 212.

26 Qtd. in ibid., 103.

27 Ibid., 90.

28 Parrish, Genius of America, x.

29 Foley, Wrestling with the Left, 7.

30 Ellison, Juneteenth, 302

31 Ellison, Three Days, 343.

32 See Breit, “Talk with Ralph Ellison,” BR26.

33 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7.

34 Parrish does an excellent job enumerating these commonalities. See chapter 4 in his Genius of America, titled “Invisible Man’s Political Vision: Ellison and King.” In an era when King’s birthday is a bank holiday, it can be difficult for many to imagine how controversial he was, especially before his martyrdom—even among figures like Ellison who were genuinely sympathetic to his broader goals. We have already considered a telling exchange in a letter from Nathan A. Scott Jr. to Ellison, written June 6, 1963—following April and May’s Birmingham campaign and less than a week before the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12—encapsulates this ambivalent acceptance. Scott writes,

I could be far more hopeful than I am about the possibility of a genuinely prophetic movement arising out of the Negro community in this country, a movement capable of projecting a truly radical critique of the whole gamut of American culture—I could be far more hopeful about the possibility of this, if I could see any indication that this new leadership in the “freedom movement” was not only concerned with immediate tactical maneuvers but was also attempting, through the bitter experiences in the South today, in some really deep and authentic way to face the full truth about the human City, in the special way that it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment. But all one hears is the dreary Sunday-School moralism of Luther King. . . . And, as I say, in all the mutations this has undergone by the time it’s mouthed by the Negro college students whom I meet, one’s final impression is of a coarsening of moral sensibility and a blunting of political perception.

Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Rampersad (Ralph Ellison) depicts Ellison’s attitudes toward King’s action and legacy as generally favorable. Interesting reflections upon the man and his legacy are buried in Ellison’s papers. For instance, on the back of a reply card for contributions to Bella Abzug’s New York City mayoral campaign (which would place the jotting most likely in 1977, the year of Abzug’s candidacy), Ellison’s scrawled, barely legibly, “What would C Scott King do if by a [illegible] of the Christian miracle M. L. K. returned to earth if only in her dream? Grand Inquisitor[.] Why? Consequences. Womens[’] rights[.] Why destroy his myth? He sees outcome of his efforts and martyrdom” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 4).

35 Lischer’s Preacher King remains an outstanding resource exploring the rhetorical, performative, and theological antecedents that contributed to King’s powerful public image.

36 King found conflict with the Black Power generation (for King this was frequently the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]) and has more recently been championed by conservative cultural groups such as the Republican Tea Party.

37 A number of sources comment in passing on various connections between Ellison and King—including Laura Saunders’s astute recognition that Ellison, through Hickman, drew upon a common preacherly “heritage” as King (“Black Church,” 40), and Sundquist’s brief acknowledgements of a sustained reading of their common orientations toward race and nation in a civil-religious context (King’s Dream, 87, 89, 202).

38 Washington, Testament of Hope, 291–92. For more on the historical and theological context of the letter, see Branch, Pillar of Fire, 47–49, and, more broadly, the first twelve chapters of that book.

39 See Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Collected Essays, 188.

40 Washington, Testament of Hope, 297.

41 Breit, “Talk with Ralph Ellison,” BR 26.

42 Ellison told John Hersey in 1974 that “The [second novel] was conceived before Martin Luther King became such a [religious] figure, but he, too, had to enter the realm of politics, while trying to stay outside it.” Something is off in Ellison’s memory (or in what he wishes to reveal). He claims to have begun work on the second novel in 1958—a good four to six years after the now-accepted range of 1952–54. In addition, by 1958 Ellison knew of King, writing approvingly of his actions in 1955’s Montgomery bus boycott in a September 28, 1958, letter to Albert Murray. See Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 196.

43 Ellison, Juneteenth, 280. Versions of this passage and the next one may also be found in Ellison’s Three Days (418–21, 574–78). The Juneteenth edition emphasizes Lincoln’s connection with Bliss.

44 Parrish, Genius of America, 178.

45 Ellison, Juneteenth, 281. See also Three Days, 419–20, 576.

46 Benston, Speaking for You, 29.

47 Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 2; italics mine. This quotation comes from a single typewritten page, with handwritten corrections, (mis-)filed among extant papers for Ellison’s talks in the mid-1950s. The fact that Ellison refers to King in both the past and present tenses makes it harder to date, although given its elegiac tone it could come from around the time of King’s death.

48 Ibid.

49 Washington, Testament of Hope, 245–52.

50 Ibid. See the entire chapter “1970” for a nice encapsulation that supports the thrust of this argument.

51 Ibid., 217.

52 Ellison, “And Hickman Arrives,” 5–49, includes the Washington, DC, episodes and thus precludes the possibility that Ellison directly cites the “I Have a Dream” address. Still, this convergence, as it stands, with Ellison foretelling such an iconic scene, reinforces the symbolism and its power even more strongly. This specific treatment may also be found in Three Days, 1004–34.

53 Ellison, Juneteenth, 355

54 Ellison, Three Days, 577. For more on the correspondences between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, see Blight, American Oracle.

55 Richey and Jones, “Civil Religion Debate,” 3–18, elaborate on the emergence of American civil religion and its attendant debates. The historicization of American civil religion undertaken in this chapter does not take into account more recent (and one should add, more sophisticated) treatments of the concept, Manis, for instance, writes of American civil religion as “American exceptionalism in a religious mode,” a “system of mythic meanings, embedded and diffused through their culture, by which Americans interpret the ultimate meaning of the nation” (“Civil Religion,” 91). Note that Manis speaks from a more critical remove than Martin Marty, Robert Bellah, and others do historically. See also Beneke, Beyond Toleration; Cristi, Civil to Political Religion; Gerstle, American Crucible; Hammond, Porterfield, Mosely, and Sarna, “Forum”; Howard-Pittney, African American Jeremiad; and Porterfield, Transformation of American Religion, among others.

56 See Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, and White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech.

57 Ellison, Three Days, 242. A similar version may be found in Juneteenth (20–21). I share Bradley’s fascination with what appears to be counterintuitive in Sunraider’s rhetoric in this passage. It is ironic the extent to which Sunraider’s best speech, spoken as a race-baiting white senator, echoes authorally endorsed ideals of democracy, improvisation, and a sense of American character. See Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 126–27.

58 For instance, in the mid-1950s, he noted, “Lincoln and the problem of the one and the many[.] Love the binder” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 2).

59 Charles Long invokes Invisible Man in his own contribution to Richey and Jones, American Civil Religion, “Civil Rights—Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion.” Long claims that within the myths of American civil religion, African Americans (and other marginalized groups) remain invisible, in no small part, as Mircea Eliade suggests, because myth is “the true story” (218). In this way the effacement of “others” from the American mythology signals the “true” nature of American civil religion as a transcendent projection of a national ideal. Long’s solution is the rupture of this mythology of the unum through moments of radical emphasis upon the pluribus that are occasioned by history (“the Nat Turners, Denmark Veseys, David Walkers, Du Boises, Marcus Garveys, Malcolm Xs, and Martin Luther Kings to the present day” [217]). While positing Ellisonian invisibility, Long does not pursue a reading of Ellison’s civil religion. Ellison would disagree with Long, noting that the aggregation of general and particular that American civil religion occasions approximates the establishment of identity among “others” in American culture. Invisibility is not the final consequence of exclusion but the creative method by which African Americans as Long’s “recalcitrant slaves” occasion “black struggle against the American myth” in their daily existences (217).

60 Ellison, Invisible Man, 340–55. Allen goes to some lengths to dispel the connections between the Brotherhood and the Communist Party (Talking to Strangers, esp. 108 and 212n9). On the one hand, her instincts are correct: we shouldn’t assume uncritically that a one-to-one correspondence absolutely pertains between the two. On the other hand, Ellison clearly intends to invoke the Communist Party and to satirize it, or a leftist political organization like it.

61 Ellison, Invisible Man, 498.

62 Emphasis mine. Bradley offers a detailed archival discussion of the links between Rinehart and Bliss (Ralph Ellison in Progress; see esp. 125, though all of chapter 4 [“1952”] proves illuminating).

63 Ellison, Invisible Man, 577.

64 Ellison, Collected Essays, 55–56.

65 Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 82. W. E. B. DuBois writes,

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body. . . . The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—the longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.

The Souls of Black Folk, 5. Note that DuBois, too, utilizes a sense of Negro-Americanness that we have located earlier in Ellison and King.

66 Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 68.

67 Ibid., 397.

68 The emergence of “Black Power” as a slogan was voiced in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks (Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 485–87) in frustration over the younger men’s perceptions of King as accommodationist (218–33). Theologically speaking, Cone reintegrates King to Black Power in Black Theology, but does so by highlighting the more radical elements of his message (see esp. 108–9).

69 Perlstein (Nixonland) refers to a period—this period—ranging roughly from the 1964 presidential election (coming as it did in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination a year earlier) to Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 as a period that witnessed an “erosion of consensus” in the United States.

70 Marty, One and Many. See also Bellah’s Broken Covenant.

71 Ellison was named a Distinguished Research Associate of Colonial Williamsburg in 1986. It was largely an honorific title, though Ellison did express some hope of participating in ongoing attempts to “integrate” the “experience.”

72 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 477.

73 See ibid., 476–78 and 498–99, for a more detailed discussion of Ellison’s involvement with the CWF.

74 Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg, 13.

75 Another issue was Colonial Williamsburg’s need to generate revenue to remain viable, thus resurrecting the old, old story of conflict between creating a fun or comfortable environment for its customers versus its historical and pedagogical responsibilities as a museum. See ibid., 14–15.

76 Ibid., 15. A 1977 document in Ellison’s files, “Teaching History at Colonial Williamsburg: A Plan of Education” diagnoses the problem, noting that “there was a remarkable unanimity in 1945 concerning the Williamsburg story,” “a consensus.” Writing a formal statement of purpose merely codified an unwritten, but already widely held, sense of purpose.” The document continues, “Today there is no consensus.” See Ellison Papers, part II, box 38, folder 4, p. iv. Note that “consensus” is Pearlstein’s word too.

77 Harden and Gable chart the process (and progress) of this transition in New History.

78 Ellison Papers, part II, box 38, folder 4.

79 Ellison, Collected Essays, 212. In “Society, Morality,” Ellison argues that “universality” is achieved, “if at all . . . by amplifying and giving resonance to a specific complex of experience until . . . that specific part of life speaks metaphorically for the whole” (in Collected Essays, 696).

80 Marty, One and Many, 3.

81 Marty, Modern American Religion, 3:3.

82 Ibid.

83 Allen locates Ellisonian “antagonistic cooperation” in a tradition of Aristotelian reciprocity (Talking to Strangers, esp. 188 and 119–39).

84 Ellison Papers, part I, box 110, folder 3.

85 Ibid.

86 See Harriss, “Let Us Not Falter,” 116–30.

Chapter 5. Conceived in Sin

1 Ellison also served briefer stints at a number of colleges and universities in the United States and abroad as a lecturer or other contributor to campus organizations and events.

2 See, for instance, Ellison’s extended assessment of teaching at Bard in his letter to Albert Murray on June 27, 1959, in Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 203–5.

3 The arc of Ellison’s teaching career shows definite decline in its quality as Rampersad represents it. Compare his depiction of Ellison’s Bard years (Ralph Ellison, 360–61) with New York University’s (481–83).

4 An interesting place to begin such a consideration is with the “Thirtieth Anniversary Preface” (1982) to Invisible Man. Also, Going to the Territory (1986) carries a similar mood.

5 In an August 17, 1959, letter to Ellison, speaking of his Bard appointment, Albert Murray reports that he is glad to hear that “old Hickman [a protagonist in the second novel] is thriving on it.” See Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 210.

6 See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 471.

7 For materials on Ellison’s work at Bard College, see Ellison Papers, part I, box 17. His materials from Chicago may be found in part I, box 19, folder 4. For further evidence that Ellison taught courses in both the American and Russian novel at Bard during the 1959–60 academic year, see Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 205.

8 For materials on Ellison’s work at Rutgers, see Ellison Papers, part I, box 19, folders 1–2. Materials from NYU may be found in part I, boxes 17–18.

9 For instance, in his acceptance of the National Book Award, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” Ellison claims that with the exception of Faulkner, “something vital had gone out of American prose after Mark Twain” (in Collected Essays, 152). No small part of Faulkner’s work is, itself, set in the nineteenth century or its immediate aftermath, and thus reflects on significant themes that occupied the former authors listed above. With regard to Hemingway, recall his remarks on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as the beginning of American literature (“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ”) (Green Hills of Africa, 22)—an argument to which Ellison appeals on occasion (see, for instance, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Collected Essays, 90).

10 Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 8.

11 Ellison, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” in Collected Essays, 152–53.

12 Ellison, “Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 223.

13 Ellison, “Novel as a Function,” in Collected Essays, 756. Significantly, Ellison understands the novel as an ideal form for American expression. In “Society, Morality,” (in Collected Essays, 694–725), Ellison writes, “If the novel had not existed at the time the United States started becoming conscious of itself as a nation—a process still, fortunately, for ourselves and the world, unachieved—it would have been necessary for Americans to invent it” (701).

14 Ellison, “Novel as a Function,” in Collected Essays, 757.

15 See the materials from Ellison’s lectures at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, August and September 1954. Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 2. Materials from his seminar at Tuskegee in June 1954, contained in the same folder, also refer to “The Sacred Documents.”

16 Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 2. Here we also detect traces of Toni Morrison’s argument in Playing in the Dark.

17 Ellison, “Novel as a Function,” in Collected Essays, 762; Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 697. Ellison reprises the phrase with a slight modification on 702: “In the beginning was not only the word, but its contradiction.”

18 Ellison, Invisible Man, 200–201, 217–18.

19 John 1:1 (KJV).

20 Genesis 1:1 (KJV).

21 Ellison, “Perspective of Literature,” in Collected Essays, 778.

22 In an American context original sin’s Calvinist emphasis accompanied the earlier Separatists and Puritans at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. A letter from Peter Fontaine of Virginia to Moses Fontaine, dated March 30, 1757, reflects the institution of slavery as rooted in the inherently sinful nature of human beings and, especially, slaveholders: “[Purchasing slaves] of course draws us all into the original sin and curse of the country . . . and this is the reason we have no merchants, traders, or artificers of any sort but what become planters in short time” (Rodriguez, Slavery, 551). Jim Wallis’s article “America’s Original Sin: The Legacy of White Racism” offers a sense of the Ellisonian mode, but also refers to an originary set of actions (“The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another”) to establish the underdefined role of original sin itself (in Hulteen and Wallis, America’s Original Sin, 8). William Casey King (“Icarus Unbound,” 138–47) argues that the era of the American Revolution and the United States’ founding documents mark a shift in original sin, from justifying the enslavement of human beings to a view more in keeping with Ellison’s—that it represents a fundamental contradiction of human virtue.

23 Jacobs, Original Sin, 8.

24 Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, 235.

25 See Matthiessen, American Renaissance.

26 Lewis, American Adam, 5. Note that American Adam’s publication date of 1955 places it firmly in Invisible Man’s contemporary orbit. It also coincides nicely with the outset of Ellison’s own teaching career and the point in time where work on his second novel began in earnest.

27 Ibid.

28 Holifield, Theology in America, 364. For an extended overview of this shift, see 341–69. See also Noll, America’s God, 293–329; and Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney.

29 See H. S. Smith, Changing Conceptions, and Jacobs, Original Sin.

30 See Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism.

31 Noll calls this transition “the Americanization of Calvinism,” distinguishing newer innovations from “the traditionalist positions” (which he develops from the characterizations of Charles Hodge). In Noll’s words (America’s God, 266–67), the Old School held that:

1. (a) Humans possessed a sinful nature that they inherited by Adam.
2. (b) Humans were by nature free, but this was a freedom to do what they chose to do, not a freedom to act contrary to their character as sinners.
3. (c) Thus, the great problem for humanity was its sinful state, from which came individual acts of sin.

Theologians and groups (including “Unitarians, Finneyite revivalists, and sometimes New Haven theologians”) repudiated this position, which they deemed outmoded and Noll characterizes as out of tune with “American values.” Accordingly, and again in Noll’s words,

1. (a) Humans did not have a sinful nature inherited from Adam but were influenced by . . . a fallen humanity to become sinners.
2. (b) Humans were by nature free, which meant an ability to choose with liberty against powerful motives or personal character as it had developed. . . .
3. (c) Thus the great problem for humanity was that people chose to sin and thus, because of these choices, were constituted as sinful.

32 Modern describes the management of sin among reformers at New York’s Sing Sing prison upon its opening in 1829 in this way: “They sought to chart and manage the ways, means, and expression of sin within a public setting. The motivation to contain ‘contaminating influences’ within the penitentiary reflected a particular orientation toward sin that drew from the epistemological and political fundaments of evangelical secularism—theistic Common Sense and republicanism. Sin was identifiable. It was containable. It was an opportunity for the individual criminal to convert him- or herself into a ‘republican machine’” (Secularism in Antebellum America, 256–57). Common Sense republicanism, of course, functions as a form of Noll’s American religious unconscious in America’s God. See Sonia Hazard, Dana Wiggins Logan, and Caleb J. D. Maskell’s respective contributions to the “Forum on Antebellum American Protestantism,” 608–24.

33 Elsewhere Noll depicts this migration of the identity of sin by noting more broadly an “ideological evolution.” In ethics this shifted from an Augustinian understanding to one rooted in the thought of Frances Hutcheson, “which considered virtue as a live possibility for all people on the basis of natural endowments from God.” Noll continues, “The movement was away from a conservative definition of human freedom as constrained by human character. . . . The movement was toward a belief . . . in moral choices,” which he exemplifies in Charles Finney, “the nineteenth-century’s best-known revivalist” (Noll, Civil War, 23–24). For a grassroots depiction of this transition in popular culture, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, esp. 41–42 and 170–79. For more on the growing willfulness of sin—especially in New England—approaching the mid-nineteenth century, see Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, 122–23.

34 Noll memorably describes this demarcation as “a deeply entrenched intellectual synthesis divided against itself” (Civil War, 21). H. Stout (Upon the Altar) traces these divisions into theological justifications for the Civil War.

35 Ellison spoke of this narrative in an undated class lecture at New York University: “The story of Ham appears in the Bible as a justification of color discrimination and of slavery, giving it divine sanction. Nor did all northern churches disapprove of slavery” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 7). See S. A. Johnson, Myth of Ham.

36 See Berkovich, American Jeremiad, and Murphy, Prodigal Nation. The jeremiad, of course, tends periodically to resurface. This chapter, in a sense, tracks two parallel accounts of its resurfacing.

37 See Applegate, Most Famous Man, and Mullin, Puritan as Yankee, in addition to Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, and Holifield, Theology in America.

38 Marty, Righteous Empire, 117.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Lewis, American Adam, 7.

42 Lundin complicates Emerson’s identification with this category in From Nature to Experience.

43 Ibid., 8. There is an interesting relationship between this irony and Alan Nadel’s characterization of roughly this same period—the “golden day” of Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day (1926)—from which Ellison derives the name of the brothel to which the invisible man takes Norton. Nadel, who does not mention R. W. B. Lewis except obliquely in his introduction (Invisible Criticism, xiii), argues convincingly that a sense of irony qualifies the relationship between Norton and the invisible man—“their symbiotic blindness.” Nadel continues: “This is exactly what Ellison says the literature of the Golden Day [which Mumford claims to last from 1830 to 1860] contains, and what has been lost in the twentieth century. Norton’s illness and blindness are one and the same, both deriving from the fact that he lives in a world which insulates him from the moral consequences of his actions” (101).

44 Lewis, American Adam, 9, 8. Lewis also argues that Ellison’s invisible protagonist (along with Salinger’s Holden Caufield and Bellow’s Augie March) represents a contemporary instance of the American Adam: “The newborn, or self-breeding, or orphaned hero is plunged again and again, for his own good and for ours, into the spurious, disruptive rituals of the active world” (American Adam, 197–98).

45 I make this point in direct response to critics who see Ellison as overly sanguine in the Cold War period. There can be no doubt that Ellison’s outlook may prove more positive than many peers, yet he always maintains the alternative, ironic inflection. Failure to recognize this point stems fashionably from a stubborn, inverse nostalgia that, in the end, proves equally excessive to the straw position it seeks to redress.

46 Though he would (and likely did) recognize racism as working in this way, Reinhold Niebuhr names the atomic bomb and its capacity for world annihilation as the “exception” to American innocence in Irony of American History. See especially Niebuhr’s first chapter, “The Ironic Element in the American Situation” for a good overview.

47 Lewis, American Adam, 8.

48 Ibid., 9.

49 Finstuen, Original Sin, 70. See also Wacker, America’s Pastor, 41, and S. P. Miller, Billy Graham, 47.

50 See Stevens, God-Fearing and Free.

51 Finstuen, Original Sin, 189.

52 See, for instance, Lee, “Ellison’s Invisible Man, 331–44, and Deutsch, “Ralph Waldo Ellison,” 159–78.

53 Ellison explains the connections (and lack thereof) inherent in his own name’s resonance (Ralph Waldo Ellison) with Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” Collected Essays, 189–209; see esp. 194–97.

54 Douglass, of course, was not a novelist, per se. However, in his compulsive writing and rewriting of the narrative of his life (he wrote three autobiographies), one recognizes a novelistic impulse—one particularly in keeping with the proto-novelistic genres of narrative described by Hunter in Before Novels.

55 Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 185.

56 Nadel’s treatment of Emerson as an Ellisonian figure, for instance, remains more ambivalent. Again, this distinction—indeed, the very character of Emerson’s Ellisonian depiction—is rooted in the capacity (or lack thereof) successfully to recognize, comprehend, and ultimately to confront evil. Nadel’s reading is impressive, and yet he could extend it beyond a “historical and political engagement with blackness and the problem of evil” and recognize these central issues as fundamentally theological (Invisible Criticism, 116). As Nadel puts it later, “Ellison is reiterating Melville’s rejection of Emerson—that he failed to confront evil” (122).

57 Lewis, American Adam, 198. He offers a similar claim in his early review of Invisible Man. See Lewis, “Eccentric’s Pilgrimage,” 148–49.

58 Melville, Moby-Dick, 18; hereafter cited in the text by page number.

59 Ellison, Invisible Man, 9–10.

60 See, for instance, Herbert, “Moby-Dick” and Calvinism.

61 Melville, Moby-Dick, 144.

62 See Grimes, “Masking,” 508–16.

63 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

64 Ibid., 8, 12–14.

65 Singer, Black and Blue.

66 Booth, Rhetoric of Irony, 3–7. For more on Melville and irony, see Seelye, Melville.

67 Ibid., 240–45.

68 Ibid., 253.

69 Melville, Billy Budd, 298.

70 Ibid., 301; emphasis mine.

71 Ibid., 375.

72 Ellison, Invisible Man, 33, 194.

73 See Bradley’s fourth chapter (“1952”) in Ralph Ellison in Progress.

74 Hardwick, Herman Melville, 116.

75 Melville, Confidence-Man, 17.

76 Ellison, “Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 223.

77 Ellison, Invisible Man, 498.

78 Ibid.

79 Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 121–44.

80 Ellison, Juneteenth, 286–320.

81 Melville, Billy Budd, 257.

82 Ibid., 257–58.

83 Nadel offers a superlative reading of the Golden Day episode as expressive of Benito Cereno (Invisible Criticism, 104–11).

84 Ellison, Invisible Man, 139.

85 Ibid., 102.

86 Bigsby, “Improvising America, 175.

87 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 23.

88 Booth, Rhetoric of Irony, 253.

89 Ibid., 267.

90 Ibid.

91 Ibid., 268.

92 Hawthorne, English Notebooks, 432.

93 There are two major exceptions to this trend. The first (which, interestingly enough, is now nearly four decades old), is Robert Stepto’s “Literacy and Hibernation,” which considers the relationship between Invisible Man and the generic form of Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), among other exemplary works in African American literature (see “Literacy and Hibernation: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” which is chapter 6 in Stepto’s From Behind the Veil [163–94]. John F. Callahan dwells on Douglass in “Chaos, Complexity, and Possibility,” 125–43). The second, Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left, illuminates Douglass’s expanded role in earlier versions of Invisible Man as part of LeRoy’s journal—a subplot deleted from the final, canonical edition (Foley, Wrestling with the Left, esp. 230–34). Nadel and other critics concerned with Ellison’s nineteenth-century American inheritance expend far less time and energy reading Douglass than they do Melville, Emerson, Twain, Hawthorne, and the like. Otherwise, the most thorough assessments of Ellison and Douglass taken together tend to be authored by critics engaged with Ellison as a political figure (see Rice, Politics of the Novel, and Stephens, On Racial Frontiers. The exception here is Lucas Morel’s outstanding edited volume, Raft of Hope, which contains only two mentions of Douglass [5, 128]. See also Hardin, “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” 96–120).

94 Blount, “Certain Eloquence,” 684.

95 It is interesting to consider Ellison’s remarks in the context of recent suggestions that scholars and teachers need to move beyond Douglass as an exemplar for studying slavery and, particularly, its narratives—precisely because he was not representative of more common experiences and attributes.

96 Maguire, Conversations with Albert Murray, 2–3.

97 As Ellison puts it, speaking more broadly—and yet, certainly from experience, “Negroes have been educated in schools named in [Douglass’s] honor without being told who he was or for what values he stood” (Ellison, “Great Day Coming”).

98 Blount, “Certain Eloquence,” 682.

99 And in this way we find further cause, perhaps, to deemphasize Emerson. For an interesting rejoinder, see J. Brooks, “From Edwards to Baldwin,” 425–40.

100 Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 4–5.

101 Ellison, “Great Day Coming.”

102 Ibid.

103 Ellison claims in his introduction to the 1982 edition of Invisible Man that the sentence dates to the summer of 1945, when he first wrote it longhand in a Vermont barn (Ellison, Invisible Man, vii). Rampersad’s research leads him to believe that the sentence could come from a year earlier, in 1944 (Ralph Ellison, 194–95).

104 Ellison, “Great Day Coming.” It would be interesting to register Ellison’s reactions to the depictions of John Brown and Douglass in James McBride’s recent novel, The Good Lord Bird (2013), which clearly operates in an Ellisonian vein.

105 Douglass, Autobiographies, 662–63.

106 Ellison, Invisible Man, 345, 348–49.

107 Ibid., 473.

108 Ellison, “Great Day Coming.”

109 See Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative, and Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative.

110 Robert Stepto, “Literacy and Hibernation,” in Benston, Speaking for You, 363.

111 Andrews, Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, 109–10. Recall, too, Nathan Scott’s own Independence Day address in Chicago, 1972.

112 Ibid., 110.

113 Ibid., 116.

114 Ibid., 117.

115 Ibid., 127.

116 See Bivins, Spirits Rejoice!

Conclusion

1 Groebner, Defaced, 65.

2 Ellison, Invisible Man, 581.

3 This is the critical tradition that Warren chafes against in So Black and Blue. For Warren, readings of Invisible Man that “speak to and for the larger human condition” deflect attention from “the way that ascribed racial status reflects and is refracted through some of the central issues of particular historical moments” (3, 23).

4 H. R. Niebuhr, “Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards,” in his Theology, History, Culture, 131.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 132.

7 Ibid. Niebuhr also makes a plea to understand God as big as Edwards’s God: “What we do not know—or do not yet know—is that God is as holy as Edwards knew him to be.”

8 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “postracial” as “designating a time period, society, etc., in which racism is no longer institutionalized or no longer exists” and lists a 1971 New York Times article as the earliest reference to “postracial,” referring to the emergence of a postracial era in the American South. The timing of this and other listings (1971, 1983, and 1997) as well as their geographical focus on the South mark the postracial as a post–civil rights phenomenon in many respects (see http://www.oed.com). A number of sources traced the evolution of the idea and its significance. In addition to a number of papers of record, see Ambinder, “Exchange on Obama” and “Race Over?”; Crowley, “Post-Racial”; Pinckney, “What He Really Said”; Sullivan, “Goodbye to All That; and Tolson, “Does Obama’s Winning Streak.”

9 An outstanding bibliography of sources on the postracial phenomenon, more broadly, and its specific significance in terms of the Obamas has begun to emerge in the past several years (and, no doubt, shall proliferate over the next decade). See, among others, Ikard and Teasly, Nation of Cowards; Jeter and Pierre, Day Late; Kinder and Dale-Riddle, End of Race?; King and Smith, Still a House Divided; Logan, “At This Defining Moment”; Sugrue, Not Even Past; Tesler and Sears, Obama’s Race; Touré, Who’s Afraid.

10 See Warren, What Was?, and Glaude, “Black Church Is Dead.”

11 Warren’s thesis has found criticism in venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books (see Edwards and Michaels, “African American Literature). For responses to Glaude, see, for instance, the responses cataloged by Religion Dispatches, http://www.religiondispatches.org, and Columbia University’s roundtable co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and the Institute for Research in African American Studies: “Is the Black Church Dead?: A Roundtable on the Future of Black Churches,” available at http://www.youtube.com, which broadened the scope of the debate to venues like the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) and National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org).

12 Vaux offers a nice overview of Eastwood’s larger, and complicated, ethical dynamics in Ethical Vision, 1–9.

13 On revisionist westerns, see Aquila, Sagebrush Trail, and Neibaur, Clint Eastwood Westerns. Ideas and prose in this section come from an unpublished short piece I coauthored with John Howell in 2012, titled “Unconventional Speech,” which I use here with permission. I have sought to credit Howell’s unique ideas and phrases where they may be discerned. In other instances I am grateful to him for his insights and observations that formed not only our collaboration but also the larger reflections it spurred.

14 Lavender, “Empty Chair ‘Lynched.’”

15 Lavender, “Obama Empty Chair.”

16 See Eng, Feeling of Kinship, esp. 1–57. Thanks to John Howell for suggesting this source.

17 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

18 We find an interesting illustration here of the religious and theological antecedents of secularism by noting that many understand this clash to remain one between not secularism and Islam, or competing political ideologies, but uniquely and overtly as an impasse and war between Christianity and Islam. For many, and not solely for evangelical Christians, the clash between secular civilization and theocracy invokes an invisible Christianity.

19 The best (and best-known) reading of surveillance in modernity is, of course, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

20 See, for instance, Bacevich’s American Empire. For more on the role of FBI surveillance in the management of African American individuals and institutions, see especially part 3 of Sylvester Johnson’s African American Religions. Also see Greenberg, Surveillance in America.

21 The long-standard account of the formation of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction—Horn’s Invisible Empire—does not remain in favor today, yet the title is clearly significant for our purposes. I should note that I do not wish to invoke a one-to-one correspondence between US military initiatives and the KKK, though levels of secrecy, adjudication outside of legally recognized and sanctioned courts, and certain tendencies toward racial profiling make the comparison more apt than it should be. On Abu Ghraib, see Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” Susan Sontag’s reading of the Abu Ghraib revelations argues that “the photographs are us,” and therefore “representative of the fundamental corruptions” at the root of foreign occupation, even as they are usually hidden or invisible. See Sontag, “Torture of Others.”

22 Ellison, Invisible Man, 498.

23 Ibid., 495.

24 Ibid., 495–96.

25 Literature on drones and their broader implications grows daily. Future historians will do very well to trace the evolution of thinking about and attitudes toward drones in essays from the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books since roughly 2005. Other assessments that have proved useful in my own thinking include Benjamin, Drone Warfare, and Boyle, “Costs and Consequences,” 1–29. For a good point-counterpoint exchange concerning the various efficacies and shortcomings of drones, see Bynum, “Why Drones Work,” 32–43, and Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” 44–54.

26 Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” 48. Al Qaeda signifies its invisibility deliberately, relying on ignorance and ambivalence to generate indeterminacy. On September 12, 2001, President George W. Bush claimed, “The American people need to know that we’re facing a different enemy than we have ever faced. This enemy hides in shadows, and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover. But it won’t be able to run for cover forever. This is an enemy that tries to hide. But it won’t be able to hide forever. This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe. But they won’t be safe forever” (http://www.pbs.org/newshour). Early assessments of the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) draw similarly on Islam as a blanket denomination for an organization comprised of stunning, inconsistent diversities among those who join. Its effectiveness in executing attacks in Europe derives from the invisibility of the Ellisonian “seen unseen” as a mode of invisibility. Similarly, as in the 2016 attacks on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in the United States, a willingness to graft actors who pledge allegiance ex post facto yet have no discernible prior affiliations with the organization also points to indeterminacy in how, precisely, one “sees” such an organization and its membership in the grander scheme.

27 According to Boyle, “During his first term, President Obama launched nearly six times as many drone strikes than President Bush did throughout his eight years in office” (“Costs and Consequences,” 2).

28 Harris and Rivera, “Border Control,” 7, 9.

29 In addition to Benjamin’s Drone Warfare, Cronin (“Why Drones Fail”) and others draw on this analogy.

30 See both Bynum (“Why Drones Work”) and Cronin (“Why Drones Fail”). For more on collateral damage, see Nathanson, Terrorism, 247–87.

31 Holmqvist, “Undoing War,” 545.

32 See Sundstrom, Browning of America.

33 Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 397.