The Anti-Racist Avant-Garde: Modernist Legacies and Experimentation in Ralph Ellison and James Joyces’ postcolonial and racial subjects
When Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, he cemented himself as a crucial figure in the American literary canon. His depictions of the difficulties in African American life remain crucial and relevant to this day, seventy years after their publication. The themes of nationhood, visibility, technology, and betrayal found in Ellison’s work still resonate deeply with modern society, and through the depth of his prose Ellison was able to render a fully three-dimensional picture of how the tensions between these themes manifested themselves in Black life. Ellison took great inspiration from the modernist writers of the early twentieth century in the production of his work, but arguably no writer played a more significant role in Ellison’s literary development than James Joyce. Despite this clear engagement with Joyce’s modernist legacies, relatively little has been written about Ellison’s relationship to the Irish author - a lacuna which provides the inspiration for this thesis. The first chapter will look at Joyce’s ‘A Mother’ and Ellison’s ‘In A Strange Country’ to provide an overview of each authors’ early anti-colonial/-racist arguments, with specific focus on their use of music as it relates to nationalism. The second chapter will discuss the pinnacle of each authors’ canon - Ulysses and Invisible Man respectively - within a cultural materialist framework. This chapter will investigate the temporal experimentation in the ‘Cyclops’ section of Ulysses and the ‘Prologue’ and ‘Epilogue’ sections of Invisible Man, examining how such experimentation effects the anti-colonial/-racist arguments in each text. The final chapter will focus primarily on several published excerpts from Ellison’s unpublished second novel Three Days Before The Shooting…, discussing how his experimentation in these pieces allowed him to dissect and expose the socio-technical ensembles that enabled the promulgation of white supremacy in America. The radio sections of Finnegans Wake will provide crucial support here, with Ellison’s ‘Cadillac Flambé’ providing the pivot point for the chapter. This thesis will chart a parallel development in Joyce and Ellisons’ work, from their early short stories, to their career defining novels Invisible Man and Ulysses, before looking at their final works, investigating the symbiotic relationship between the experimentation in and the serialisation of these novels. It will argue that their technical and formal experimentation enabled a nuance and complexity in their arguments which would otherwise have been lacking, and as such bolstered their textual diagnoses of the multi-faceted issues of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, creating more sophisticated blueprints for social change.
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