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Chapter 6 - Albert Murray Beyond Plight and Blight

from II - Culture and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

By
Paul C. Taylor
Edited by
Shelly Eversley
Shelly Eversley
Affiliation:
Baruch College, The City University of New York
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Summary

This chapter explores Albert Murray’s diagnosis and refusal of key elements of 1960s-style Black cultural politics. In books like The Omni-Americans he repudiated the pessimism and particularism that he found in figures like Baldwin and replaced it with a life-affirming concrete universalism rooted in the blues as a mode of phenomenology and in the sense that a fully American Blackness could stand as an instance and emblem of universal human experience. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Murray’s life; discusses the intellectual commitments he shared with his most important interlocutor, Ralph Ellison; explains how Murray turned these shared commitments into his own distinctive philosophical apparatus; and explores what may be the clearest difference between Murray and Ellison: Murray’s willingness to cultivate followers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis, pivotal culture workers in the post-civil rights shift in U.S. racial politics.

Keywords

Black Aesthetictragicomic senseuniversalismparticularismintegrationismjazzbluesdespairjoyphenomenology
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics
 , pp. 146 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

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