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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
--. "Metatheory and the Subject of Democracy in the Work of Ralph Ellison." New Literary History 27:3 (1996): 473-502.
--. Theorizing Textual Subjects: Agency and Oppression. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. 2nd ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
Thomas, Valorie D. " '1+1=3' and Other Dilemmas: Reading Vertigo in Invisible Man, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Song of Solomon." African American Review 37 (2003): 81-94.
Trimmer, Joseph F. "The Grandfather's Riddle in Invisible Man." Black American Literature Forum 12 (1978): 46-50.
Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.
Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968.
Wolfe, Jesse. "Ambivalent Man: Ellison's Rejection of Communism." African American Review 34 (2000): 621-37.
Worcester, Kent. C. L. R. James: A Political Biography. Albany: SUNY P, 1996.
Wright, John S. "The Conscious Hero and the Rites of Man: Ellison's War." O'Meally, New 157-86.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.
--. "I Tried to Be a Communist." Atlantic Monthly 174 (1944): [1] Aug.: 61-70; [2]: Sept.: 48-56.
--. Journals, 1945, 1947. Richard Wright Papers. JWJ MSS 3, Box 117, Folders 1860-61. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Notes
(1.) See Callahan (African-American, "Chaos"), Smith, Stepto, and John S. Wright for notable identity-based readings; Baker, Kent, O'Meally, Porter, and (from a negative stance) Blake for cultural contextualizations; Frank and especially Nadel for genre discussions; Dickstein 200-10 for a recent partial historicization.
(2.) In addition to Schaub, see Gibson; Howe, "Black Boys" and "Rejoinder." Wolfe's valuable (if sometimes inaccurate) discussion uses Schaub's historical schema to reach distinct, pro-Ellison conclusions. (Schaub's own "Ellison's Masks and the Novel of Reality," published a few years before American Fiction in the Cold War, is considerably more sympathetic to the novel.) Among hostile overviews, McNeely criticizes Americanist ideology in the novel, essentially arguing that as US ideology is irremediably racist, so is Ellison's commitment to "the principle" (194-96). Watts's attack on Ellison's politics focuses on his nonfiction.
(3.) Steele's Theorizing Textual Subjects 176-201 closely follows her "Metatheory" 473, 477-96, but the discussions are framed differently. See also her Critical Confrontations (chap. 2) and "Democratic Interpretation."
(4.) For example, she spends nearly three pages (536-38) trying to determine whether Emma's remark, "[D]on't you think he should be a little blacker?" (303) might actually have occurred, rather than asking if it captures a felt sense by some African American Communists about the party's hypocrisy.
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