20th Century African American Literature

In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, the nameless African American protagonist , who has sought refuge from white supremacist society in a basement, narrates his life story and the insights he has had in self-imposed exile. Throughout the story, in which he symbolically lives through African American history after emancipation from slavery, Invisible Man struggles to find his identity, as he is socially invisible to the white majority society and other characters fail to perceive his individuality. Rejecting various political ideologies with which he was at one point affiliated, especially communism and black accommodationism, Invisible Man finds his identity by narrating the multiple subject positions he occupies to the reader, hoping that the reader will afford him the recognition he is denied in the story world. The novel is written in a modernist style that draws on black expressive culture such as jazz and the blues.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

Long overdue are scholarly close readings that shed light on the irreverent homage to the Ralph Ellison pervading Percival Everett’s Erasure, a novel less about Everett than about Ellison’s democratic aesthetics.  Narrator/protagonist, “Monk” Ellison, keeps faith with his esteemed precursor’s aesthetic idealism until his writing career is on the verge of collapse, his ensuing disillusionment perverting his idealism into vengeful, comically villainous malice against an American public that confines black  novelists to the role of feeding its addiction to the “drug” of bestial black stereotypes—a poison not a remedy to an ailing democratic body according to Ellison.

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