Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology
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Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology

M. Cooper Harriss

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Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology

M. Cooper Harriss

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Examines the religious dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man provides an unforgettable metaphor for what it means to be disregarded in society. While the term “invisibility” has become shorthand for all forms of marginalization, Ellison was primarily concerned with racial identity. M. Cooper Harriss argues that religion, too, remains relatively invisible within discussions of race and seeks to correct this through a close study of Ralph Ellison’s work. Harriss examines the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race through his evocative metaphor for the experience of blackness in America, and with an eye to uncovering previously unrecognized religious dynamics in Ellison’s life and work. Blending religious studies and theology, race theory, and fresh readings of African-American culture, Harriss draws on Ellison to create the concept of an “invisible theology,” and uses this concept as a basis for discussing religion and racial identity in contemporary American life. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology is the first book to focus on Ellison as a religious figure, and on the religious dynamics of his work. Harriss brings to light Ellison’s close friendship with theologian and literary critic Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and places Ellison in context with such legendary religious figures as Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that historical legacies of invisible theology help us make sense of more recent issues like drone warfare and Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. Rich and innovative, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology will revolutionize the way we understand Ellison, the intellectual legacies of race, and the study of religion.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2017
ISBN
9781479846450

1

From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse

Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race

On July 5 or 6, 1936, Ralph Ellison, having just completed three years’ study at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, arrived in New York City following the general route taken by millions of migrants from the rural South to the urban North during the interwar period. He quickly settled into Harlem. On only his second day in the city (or so the story goes), Ellison happened upon Alain Locke, whom he had met earlier at Tuskegee, in the lobby of the Harlem YMCA. Locke, who was speaking with Langston Hughes, welcomed Ellison and introduced him to Hughes before soon departing and leaving the new arrival to make an immediate impression upon the poet. Hughes quickly hired Ellison as a personal assistant and effectively fostered his transition to the city, making introductions and affording him an entrĂ©e to Harlem’s intellectual, cultural, and political opportunities.1 We begin with this tableau in the lobby of the Harlem YMCA because it frames the context of Ellison’s arrival within currents that moved Harlem’s intellectual and artistic scenes in the 1930s.
By 1936 Locke and Hughes represented a pivot in the African American vanguard. A decade earlier Locke, as editor of The New Negro (1925), oversaw the documentation of emergent cultural modernization in African American life that flowered before economic crisis withered the opportunity that generated it. Hughes, already a respected poet, was fast becoming a public intellectual and man of letters, emphasizing leftist political influence in his literary and journalistic writing—most evident, perhaps, in his controversial 1935 poem “Goodbye Christ,” which encourages Jesus to “beat it on away from here” to make room for a “real” alternative: “Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME.”2 Together Locke and Hughes reflect a state of flux in African American letters as older migrants settled into new lives and newer migrants (like Ellison) entered communities that, for all of their fluidity, bore established reputations. As Ellison observes in his autobiographical essay “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Harlem proved both familiar and strange: “Familiar because of my racial and cultural identification with the majority of its people and the lingering spell that had been cast nationwide by . . . the so-called Harlem Renaissance—I viewed New Yorkers through the overlay of my Alabama experience. Contrasting the whites I encountered with those I had observed in the South, I weighed class against class and compared Southern styles with their Northern counterparts. I listened to diction and noted dress, and searched for attitudes in inflections, carriage, and manners.”3 The process of migration involves the negotiation of seemingly familiar and unfamiliar epistemes. Navigation of these poles comes with tremendous risk as individuals and communities alike reinvent themselves, applying their own imaginations and circumstances to a variety of competing templates for modernity.4 Literature rates as a singular, highly effective template among these options—certainly not available to all (though definitely available to more than at any time up to that point in African American history), yet especially compelling for young Ralph Ellison and the company he kept.
This chapter contextualizes literature surrounding the urban struggle of African American migrants in the first half of the twentieth century with the problem of poetic justice in the novels of long-eighteenth-century England—especially concerning matters of race and its representation in the development of the twentieth-century African American novel. Taken together, these examples represent progressive iterations of a crisis of certainty that frames Ellison’s intellectual and writerly development. Both examples address, in their own way, questions of epistemology—the problem of knowledge—in the wake of dynamic cultural and social shifts that unmoor populations from traditional sources of certainty, authority, and identity. In this way they reflect a trajectory, from the Enlightenment to twentieth-century African American modernism, of post-Christian attempts to gain coherence and meaning while being set adrift from traditional religious authority. In the process, these eighteenth-century sources reframe race and its literary representation in the first half of the twentieth century, effectively revising the terms of Ellison’s own emergence and evolution as a literary figure and novelist during this time. The terms of comparison hinge on the novel’s prescriptive authority as a literary genre to address a crisis of certainty at the heart of migration itself: how should migrants square dynamic modes of individual and collective identity and culture with those cultures and identities left behind? African American literature of the migration era consistently invokes this epistemological crisis: what does it mean to be a “Negro” in a strange land?
Such questions pursue what we might call the “just representation” (to use Samuel Johnson’s phrase) of African American identity and culture, pointing to a parallel set of concerns among migrants from rural to urban contexts in long-eighteenth-century England. This historical template provides critical background for a reading in Zora Neale Hurston’s early novels (especially Jonah’s Gourd Vine [1934] and Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937]) and their reception among critics such as Wright, Locke, and Ellison. Pairing these disputes reflects a crisis of certainty framing racial identity as a novelistic problem that participates nonetheless in increasingly secular debates concerning the identity and representation of racial justice in modernity. What is, as one critic outlines the eighteenth-century dispute, “the proper artistic representation” of blackness, given “the real condition of the world” in the early twentieth century that constructed it?5 How might a materialist concept like race reflect a theological sensibility even among post-Christian writers and critics engaged with a presumably secular (or secularizing) modernity?
The social and epistemological conditions that led to the rise of the novel in long-eighteenth-century England reflect in African American expression what Willie James Jennings calls “the deep architecture that patterned early modern visions of peoples, places, and societies,” what Tracy Fessenden calls an “unmarked [religious] category” that we may trace in these twentieth-century analogues.6 The terms of this comparison recast African American modernity as grappling despite (or even through) its secular aims with epistemological issues that bear religious and theological significance. Toward these ends this chapter culminates with a reading in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) that charts Ellison’s eventual shift in the imagination of racial representation away from his earlier postulations against Hurston to a more mature vision as reflected in Invisible Man. The eschatological, even apocalyptic destruction that Ellison’s narrative wreaks upon Harlem—which had undergone a “renaissance” a quarter-century earlier—in the novel’s closing chapters signals Ellison’s assertion of a new aesthetic in the literary representation of race, crafted in the rhetorical and generic conventions of apocalypticism—itself an administration of justice couched in religious terms.

New Negroes and Older Reformations

Black modernism emerged in the wake of migration as people of African descent from rural, provincial origins (such as the Caribbean and the American South) began moving to northern US urban centers around the time of the Great War.7 In New York’s Harlem a group of artists, comprised primarily of recent migrants, dedicated themselves to the aesthetic task of redefining blackness in American and global contexts amid shifting ontologies of dynamic identity. The result expressed a fluid sensibility of newness and cosmopolitanism that ran counter to repressive pre-modern origins in the rural South. They were “New Negroes,” and so their literary concerns turned to representing what they understood to constitute the reality of this new identity. The New Negro heralded the emergence of the self-consciously modern cultural movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.8 Lured by opportunities foreign to the Jim Crow conditions from which they had fled, these migrants became urbanized. New York’s African American population of 23,601 in 1890 would balloon to 152,467 in 1920, and to nearly 328,000 in 1930—overall growth of just under 1,400 percent during an era spanning roughly from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to the beginning of the Great Depression.9 Chicago, whose own rich “renaissance” movement flourished in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood, witnessed similar growth.10 According to Black Metropolis, the African American population in Chicago grew from 30,150 in 1900 and 44,103 in 1910 to more than 236,000 in 1934 and 337,000 before the end of World War II, with the rate of African Americans in Chicago’s city population, below 2 percent between 1890 and just before World War I, growing to more than 10 percent by 1944.11 In the wake of stringent and drastic change, The New Negro and related renaissance movements in Harlem and Bronzeville served practically to codify new, urban, modern terms of blackness as a significant and transformed identity in American culture.12
This literary transformation bears a striking resemblance to the rise of the English novel in the long eighteenth century, which reflexively sheds new light on the literary transformations afoot during the urban renaissance movements of the Great Migration period. Between 1600 and 1750 London’s population more than tripled, while the percentage of the English population living there rose precipitously from 4.9 percent to 11.6 percent.13 This expansion and its subsequent crowding of the urban landscape facilitated at least two significant changes that could also apply to Harlem and Bronzeville: (1) A previously rural people, unmoored from the formative communities, customs, and lifestyles to which they had been accustomed, found themselves thrust into disorienting environments. (2) This new urban landscape compromised older spatial and social orientations, affecting the retention and preservation of former identities. Solitude, too, came at a premium, altering the politics of individual identity and its human interactions with classes and varieties of people one might never have encountered otherwise. Simply put, former realities no longer pertained in these novel contexts.
Emerging in the midst of such transition, the English novel responded didactically to urbanization and diversification by instructing a population largely unfamiliar with urban mores in both the dangers and best practices of urban life, reinforcing necessary tools for social, moral, and physical survival in a frequently perilous environment. It also unified the epistemological concerns of a broader reading public confronted to an unprecedented extent by strangers from across Britain and the British empire who held foreign social and moral customs. Adrift from traditional authorities and narratives that would have previously contextualized such changes in individual and corporate experience, J. Paul Hunter suggests that the novel permitted a reader to traverse a diversity of exclusive and contradictory perspectives.14
Not everyone would agree. One prominent eighteenth-century criticism of the novel held that many readers could not successfully navigate such a diversity of perspectives. Samuel Johnson, for instance, argued that literature (ideally embodied by Shakespeare’s “just representations of general nature”) should, alternatively, illustrate and instruct readers in traditional modes of certainty amid the vagaries of modernity.15 In Johnson’s view, any representation qualifies as unjust that does not contribute to the edification of its reader. Excepting incidences in which the historical record makes it impossible to do so, novels should represent “the most perfect ideal of virtue.”16 Vice should disgust. Here Johnson’s “justice” comes into focus. As it represents “general nature,” justice is not necessarily verisimilar. Novelistic realism reflects the world as it is, which may corrupt or confuse vulnerable audiences. Johnson’s “just representation of general nature” reflects the world as it should be. It represents an ordered, cohesive accounting of reality that might not cohere with the limits of human experience, but it offers a more general appraisal of reality’s grander scheme as perceived in the mind of a providential and omniscient God.
Similar issues reside at the heart of Ian Watt’s generic understanding of the novel, which holds “realism” and the problem of the correspondence between reality and novelistic representation to be epistemological problems.17 How do the inventions of fiction reflect truths of human experience? The question of realism also occupies the dispute between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding during the 1740s, through which Michael McKeon suggests that in addition to Watt’s attention to realism as a mode of truth telling, the epistemological quandary of the novel also concerns the relationship of such truth to virtue.18 Where does a novel’s virtue reside? Should it aspire to realism or to “just representations”?
Richardson’s Pamela (1741) (aptly subtitled Or, Virtue Rewarded) exemplifies Johnson’s “just representations of general nature” in its depiction of the dogged pursuit of young Pamela Andrews, a maidservant, by one Mr. B, the master of the house, narrated by Pamela in a series of letters ostensibly intended for her parents.19 Incongruous for present-day readers (rape looms large as a viable threat for much of the novel; Mr. B essentially has Pamela kidnapped and confined in a cottage at one point), Pamela’s virtue, preserved by her steadfast refusal to yield sexually to Mr. B’s pursuits, is rewarded in the end by marriage to her once tormentor, and thereby through her ascent from lower-class servitude to lady of the house. Despite Pamela’s popularity as a best seller in mid-eighteenth-century England, it also met with ridicule for its outlandish plot twists, the troubling implications it casts (whether intentionally or not) upon class dynamics, and its utter failure to recognize th...

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