Chapter 32 - Reception of the Essay Collections

Summary

This chapter provides a select overview of critical responses to Ellison’s two essay collections —Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986)—since their publication. The essays were important in the evolution of American Studies (through R.W.B. Lewis’s reaction) and the development of Jazz Studies; the jazz essays were excerpted into the volume Living with Music, edited by Robert O’Meally (2001). For critics such as Eric Lott, Hortense J. Spillers, Kenneth Warren, and David Bromwich, the collections expand on thematic concerns regarding art, politics, and race introduced in Invisible Man (1952). These and other critics reflect on the importance of these chapters for thinking about race and literature, identity and culture, laughter, music, and other topics.