Book Description
Ralph Ellison's concept of race emerges from a number of religious and theological antecedents in the western, American, and African-American traditions upon which he builds his corpus. At the core of Ellison's literary project resides a tension between his African-American identity and experience and the broader western and American inheritances through which he must navigate such identity and experience. His understanding of race relies upon negotiations between particular and universalizing senses of identity. Significantly this same tension serves as a foundational characteristic of the concept of religion in thinkers ranging from Schleiermacher to Geertz. Thus Ellison's understanding of race is religious. It bears analogical resonance with the concept of religion. This is not to say that Ellison should be understood as a "religious" or "spiritual" writer in any classic sense; he was nothing of the sort. It is to say that as a modern, secularized novelist and critic, race offers a contextual, secular surrogate--religious, yet unconsciously so--through which Ellison's characters navigate an ambiguous modern world cut adrift from older forms of authority.
