So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism

by Kenneth W. Warren

" So Black and Blue is the best work we have on Ellison in his combined roles of writer, critic, and intellectual. By locating him in the precarious cultural transition between Jim Crow and the era of promised civil rights, Warren has produced a thoroughly engaging and compelling book, original in its treatment of Ellison and his part in shaping the history of ideas in the twentieth century."—Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles

What would it mean to read Invisible Man as a document of Jim Crow America? Using Ralph Ellison's classic novel and many of his essays as starting points, Kenneth W. Warren illuminates the peculiar interrelation of politics, culture, and social scientific inquiry that arose during the post-Reconstruction era and persisted through the Civil Rights movement. Warren argues that Ellison's novel expresses the problem of who or what could represent and speak for the Negro in an age of limited political representation.

So Black and Blue shows that Ellison's successful transformation of these limits into possibilities has also, paradoxically, cast a shadow on the postsegregation world. What can be the direction of African American culture once the limits that have shaped it are stricken down? Here Warren takes up the recent, ongoing, and often contradictory veneration of Ellison's artistry by black writers and intellectuals to reveal the impoverished terms often used in discussions about the political and cultural future of African Americans. Ultimately, by showing what it would mean to take seriously the idea of American novels as creatures of their moment, Warren questions whether there can be anything that deserves the label of classic American literature.

Genres: Philosophy, Literature

141 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Kenneth W. Warren is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism.

Reviews

[Corey Wozniak]

Only read the intro.

[Chet · Rating 5 out of 5]

"As we work to even the odds created by a Jim Crow past, we are working, no matter what we tell ourselves, to make Ellison's novel more a story of the world that was, and less an account of the world that still is. Success here just might be a bad thing for Invisible Man, but such a success would be a marvelous thing, indeed."
Kenneth W. Warren: So Black and Blue

In the year 2020, academic grifters like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are justifiably being forced to wrestle with the contradiction that their careers as anti-racist "consultants" (and the large paychecks that accompany such hustles) would vanish if racism were to actually be eliminated. Their convenient dodge? Divorce their definitions of racial injustice from the economic and material realm and bring the issue firmly into the realm of interpersonal relations. This is how we get something as disgustingly offensive as a "How To" self-help book on "anti-racism", or a pamphlet on how to fix your "white fragility." Kendi now appears poised to expand his brand into child-rearing as well.

In such a toxic publishing environment I'm glad I came across Kenneth Warren's 2003 text So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. DiAngelo and Kendi's particularly naked self-aggrandizement wasn't around in 2003, but Warren finds its presagers in literary critics Houston A. Baker and Henry Louis Gates.

Gates and Baker, writes Warren, were writing African-American literary criticism at a time when "the poststructuralist storm [was] raging in English departments." In this historical moment "literary theory in the academy insisted on undermining the idea of stable identities, stable meanings, and stable texts." Baker and Gates, literally because their careers depended on it, "willful[ly] misread" Ralph Ellison in order to ensure in the midst of the deconstruction storm that "the Negro and his tradition remained standing" and on the basis of that misreading went on to "produce a black canon made incarnate through major anthologies."

Is this sort of careerist "anti-racism", however well-intentioned, worth the cost? Warren, a materialist through and through, argues persuasively it is not. Post-emancipation race essentialism in the U.S. has a clear and dangerous chronological path which thanks to Warren's work we can trace from the Jim Crow South to the Chicago School of Sociology to the literary criticism of Gates and Baker and finally (I would argue) to the more transparently self-interested grifts of DiAngelo, Kendi et al in our own times. Now more than ever is not the time to fall for the latter's cheap moralizing.

People who rely on a certain phenomenon to make a (very comfortable) living are not going to be "anti" that phenomenon, no matter how earnestly they claim otherwise.


For more from Professor Warren see also:
https://nonsite.org/article/blackness...