Book contents
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Geographical, Institutional, and Interpersonal Contexts
- Part II Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts
- Chapter 10 Visualizing Black Identity in Ellison’s Fiction
- Chapter 11 Alternating Currents: Electricity, Humanism, and Resistance
- Chapter 12 Sounds and Signs of Black Womanhood
- Chapter 13 Masculinity
- Chapter 14 Aesthetics of Democracy
- Chapter 15 Black Power and Black Arts
- Chapter 16 Wrestling with the Far Right: Ellison’s Representations of Fascism
- Chapter 17 Southwestern Swing
- Chapter 18 The Self-Fashioned American Blues Identity
- Chapter 19 Ellison’s Durational View of Bebop
- Part III Literary and Critical Contexts
- Part IV Reception and Reputation
- Index
Chapter 15 - Black Power and Black Arts
from Part II - Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2022
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Ralph Ellison in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Geographical, Institutional, and Interpersonal Contexts
- Part II Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts
- Chapter 10 Visualizing Black Identity in Ellison’s Fiction
- Chapter 11 Alternating Currents: Electricity, Humanism, and Resistance
- Chapter 12 Sounds and Signs of Black Womanhood
- Chapter 13 Masculinity
- Chapter 14 Aesthetics of Democracy
- Chapter 15 Black Power and Black Arts
- Chapter 16 Wrestling with the Far Right: Ellison’s Representations of Fascism
- Chapter 17 Southwestern Swing
- Chapter 18 The Self-Fashioned American Blues Identity
- Chapter 19 Ellison’s Durational View of Bebop
- Part III Literary and Critical Contexts
- Part IV Reception and Reputation
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores Ellison’s critical engagement with the black cultural radicalisms of the Black Power era (c. 1965-75). The chapter’s main focus is Ellison’s response to the writer-activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). For Ellison, the work of 1960s black radicals was an unwarranted, even unprincipled refusal of the promise of American cultural pluralism, a promise that blacks themselves had long struggled mightily to fulfill. But Baraka’s generation had reckoned seriously with pluralism; it was not simply Black Power’s other. Indeed, a number of Baraka’s contemporaries embraced Ellison’s pluralist interventions as a usable black past.
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- Information
- Ralph Ellison in Context , pp. 167 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021