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Influences of
Twenties and Thirties
Existentialism
and Negro Renaissance
By Ralph Ellison
One could say that
during the Forties we were still being influenced by the
attitudes and values of the Twenties and Thirties, and
by perspectives introduced to our specific community of
writers by Stalinists and the Trotskyist Left. There was
also the influence of the WPA, which provided a number
of us with our first opportunity for becoming writers.
It also provided others who were already working at the
craft with an opportunity to earn a living. And there
was also present a current of intellectual influence
derived from existentialism. I became aware of
Kierkegaard and Unamuno a good while before
existentialism became a literary “movement.” I picked it
up through the writings of André Malraux, who was
depicting existential concepts long before Sartre and
Camus made them fashionable. I became interested after
reading Man’s Hope, in which Unamuno appears as a
character. In 1937, I was present at a party where
Malraux was raising funds for the Spanish Loyalists, and
shortly afterwards, Richard Wright and I were reading
and discussing Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life.
Such ideas were new to me and very exciting in that they
made me aware of existential elements in the
spirituals and the blues. At the time, I was trying
to make connections between my own background and the
world of ideas, connections that I hadn’t had no problem
in seeing connections between European and Afro-American
music, so why not between my segregated condition and
the world of ideas? So, I was groping. Marx and Freud
were the dominant intellectual forces during that
period, and I had become aware of Freud even before
finishing high school. Marx, I encountered at
Tuskegee—but how did you put the two together? I didn’t
know, so I read, I talked, I asked questions and I
listened. Such ideas concerned me as I turned from music
to literature.
Now for the main
ideological and intellectual forces operating within the
small group in which I found myself: There was the
psychological in the form of Freudianism, the political
in the form of Marxism, and in Malraux’s fiction and
criticism, which questioned the assertions of both,
there were the concepts of existentialism. With these
there was the living presence of Langston Hughes, Claude
McKay, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown and Alain Locke.
Now I don’t mean that these figures were “influences” in
any simple-minded way, but that their examples were part
of the glamour of Harlem and thus important to your
sense of opportunity. And, although you had a vague but
different set of tunes tinkling in your head and sought
other solutions and perhaps a more complex form in which
to work, you respected them and their achievements. You
respected them even after you discovered that some of
them like, say, McKay, were inarticulate when it came to
discussing technique. In fact, Wright was far more
articulate in that area than either Hughes or McKay.
But, there was
another factor which I found most important. The writers
I’ve just mentioned related to Harlem and to the waning
influence of the Negro Renaissance, but there was a
wider world of culture to be found in New York, and I
made my closest contacts with it on the Writers Project.
There you were thrown in contact not only with black and
white writers of your own age grouping, but with a
number who had already achieved broad reputations. McKay
was one of these, but most were white.
Then there was
the old League of American Writers whose programs made
it possible for me to meet important writers who had
nothing to do with the WPA. My friendship with Wright
gave me entrée to a number of such people, and they came
to form, for me at least, a scattered but most
meaningful intellectual community. Within it, the craft
of fiction was passionately discussed. The philosophical
and political implications of artistic styles were given
endless attention. Myth, ritual and revolution got
slammed around. On the project, I hung out with a few
fellows of my own general age and the same subjects were
discussed. Incidentally, most of them were Jewish, but
this was before we realized what Hitler was really up
to, so little time was spent discussing race or
religion.
Instead, we discussed craft, in Harlem, there
was no such concentration upon what is now termed the
“Black experience” as one encounters it today, not even
between Wright and myself. I was concerned, but I felt
it to be something one worked out for oneself. I was
living that experience, so what I wanted was to be
able to make my own intellectual sense of it. Nor was
there any question in my own mind about who I was or
where I came from. It’s my face, it’s in the
neighborhoods where I grew up, it’s in the
Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church into which I was
baptized, it was in the ex-slaves I knew as a child. I’m
out of slaves on both sides of my family.
That was
history, and I couldn’t undo it; my question was how did
one bridge the gap intellectually (or at least
imaginatively), between what one felt about Negro
life, between what one felt about our people, and what
was said about us—that is, the stereotyped identity
imposed upon us by society. Yes, and what was there
being written in areas lying beyond the confines of our
neighborhoods that could be used in the task of
adequately defining our humanity? How did one get
American Negro life, that great, bursting, expressive
capacity for life, into writing? Where did one discover
ideas and techniques with which one could free one’s
mind and achieve something of one’s possibilities?
In those days,
interestingly enough, I knew a couple of the writers
who’ve attacked me from time to time in Black World.
They had little talent as writers but were then part of
the communist apparatus and given to preaching
internationalism, really meaning Russianism. Today
they’re preaching “Blackness” in the same inept accents.
Around the Communists they acted like whipping dogs that
were so glad to be associated with whites that they
accepted anything they were told and parroted any absurd
interpretation of Negro experience that was handed down
from above.
Today, barking behind what they consider to
be the protective “big gate” of Black World, they
perform like Supercargo in Invisible Man, barking
and snarling at me in order to keep other possible
dissenters in line. Years ago, after hearing me state
some unorthodox opinions, one of them shook his head and
stated, “Ellison, you say you want to be a novelist, but
you’ll never make it, thinking like that.” No, I won’t
give his name; I’m interested in the pattern, not the
individual. These two have lived in New York for years,
but they still retain their Calvinist compulsion to
control the acts and imagination of others that you find
in certain Black, down-home communities. They consider
themselves the Black man’s white man and will do almost
anything to prevent other Afro-Americans from testing
their individual possibilities.
Perhaps it’s because
they sense that the assertion of the independent
imagination is a gesture toward freedom, and freedom is
dangerous; freedom frightens them, so wanting to have it
both ways, they growl like tigers in their blessedly
segregated journals and then move among whites flinching
as though they expect a blow. Every once in a while, I
bump into one of these gents on the streets of Harlem,
and after bad-mouthing me in Black World—which he
knows I disdain to read—he approaches me with his tail
wagging and grinning like a jackass eating briars. It’s
so obscene that it’s damn near charming.
And yet, such
people have been around for a long time. Years ago, the
playwright Carlton Moss told me of attending a party
during which my ambition to become a writer was
discussed. At the time, I had been writing for two or
three years, nevertheless, they decided right then and
there that I was wasting my time. Since they couldn’t
imagine themselves being successful writers, I had to be
a fool for trying.
Source: The Essential Ellison (Interview)—Ishmael Reed,
Quincy Troupe, Steve Cannon. Ishmael Reed’s and Al
Young’s Y’Bird • Copyright © 1977, 1978 Y’Bird Magazine
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher
By
Leonard Harris
and Charles Molesworth
Alain
L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology
The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the
Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called
the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his
finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing,
and sparring with such figures as
Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston,
Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still,
Booker T.
Washington,
W. E. B. Du
Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited
first biography of this extraordinarily gifted
philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the
untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century
America’s cultural and intellectual life. Leonard Harris
and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke’s
Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at
Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential
engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first
African American Rhodes Scholar. |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. |
This collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. |
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Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great
Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and
how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in
countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to
Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection
of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the
power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign.
The Economy
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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