Chapter 27 - Postwar Literary Aesthetics

Summary

The political significance of Invisible Man’s literary aesthetics has long been contested. In the dominant narrative, Ellison is a model minority endorsing ‘vital center’ liberalism and anticommunism; revisionary scholarship has insisted on a muted but nonetheless influential relationship to the Left. Regardless, debates have consistently reproduced readings that submit to Cold War ideological imperatives. By tracking this critical genealogy and its limitations from the 1950s to the present, and incorporating recent theorizations of ‘black interiority,’ this chapter recasts the political significance of Ellisonian aesthetics—a project dedicated not to confirming, but rather dissenting from the Cold War’s hegemonic political binary.