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Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction
College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A
But Ellison is read not only within the category of American literature, but also within African-American literature. Here, his place as a master of the literature of the vernacular is well established. But as Houston Baker has emphasized, the vernacular grows out of a working-class African-American experience. While the later Ellison resisted the reduction of African-- American literature to matters of class or protest, his work was nurtured by the vernacular forms that he loved. While African-American literature and culture should not be reduced to its working class elements, it is important to examine the ways that the African-American experience involves class as well as race. Although it is also worth reading and teaching for other reasons, the African-American contribution to the literature of the cultural front is especially relevant today because it presents models for interracial solidarity that are essential for progress in racial and class equality, as well as insight into the difficulties of building such solidarity. All too often, working class is considered to be a "white" category, while multiculturalism is treated as a code word for consideration of "black" issues.Yet class is also a part of culture (as is the seemingly neutral term "white"), and class may be a more effective source of resistance to political inequality than race, if class becomes a wider source of cultural identification. As Manning Marable has suggested, drawing on the familiar distinction between race as an "artificial social construction" (1991, 188) and culture as a positive source of identification,
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the challenge for the future is to destroy and uproot "race" without negating African-Americans ethnic and cultural heritage. The new foundations for progressive black politics would not be "race" as previously understood, but the elimination of social class inequality and privilege, which continues to perpetuate the inferior condition of black Americans and millions of other Americans on the other side of the color line. (Marable 1991, 219)
Yet despite the hope that class might provide the foundation for a new progressive politics, critics such as Sherry Linkon (1999, 1-11) and Janet Zandy have noted that class has been a mostly absent category in the understanding and teaching of multiculturalism. Zandy observes that it is crucial to focus on class "not because it is the predominant identity but because in recent scholarship it is, in practical terms and use, the missing identifying principle. Like a ghost, it is there but not there, mentioned but not really welcomed into the multicultural conversation" (1994, 10). However, as the presence of recent work in working class studies (including this special issue) indicates, working-class studies is increasingly part of that conversation. In ways he could not have foreseen, Ralph Ellison is also a participant through his early fiction, which critically examines the racial division within the working class as well as possibilities for cross-racial identification. As an established writer and critic, Ellison sought, in the category of a universal literature and an understanding of the American identity as interdependent, to transcend differences of race even while celebrating the uniqueness of African-American cultural traditions. In earlier years, as a writer on the left, Ellison sought a similar yet more radical cross-racial unity in the still unfinished project of articulating an American working class identity.
