Ralph Ellison and the raft of hope : a political companion to Invisible man /

Morel (politics, Washington & Lee Univ.) has provided readers with an interesting series of essays on politics in and around Ellison's Invisible Man. Coming from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, the contributors (Morel, James Seaton, Danielle Allen, Thomas Engeman, William Nash, Alfred Brophy, Kenneth Warren, Charles Banner-Haley, Marc Conner, Herman Beavers, John Callahan) for the most part find that Ellison was a politically meaningful writer, despite the paradoxes created by his criticisms of some political writers, by his nonparticipation in major civil rights battles of his time, and by attacks on him by vocal Black Nationalist writers. Essays in this volume affirm Ellison's symbolic solutions to such paradoxes and affirm, from various disciplinary angles, Ellison's integrationist beliefs and notions that love is the deepest form of democracy. The individual essays are all fine, yet a richer flavor might have resulted if the portrait of Ellison that emerged were a bit more ... pluralistic? That said, the essays are nicely argued and testify to the variety of ways in which Ellison expressed his affirmation of democratic individualism, even if Ellison's own agonistic struggle with the notion of artistic responsibility is perhaps underplayed. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. Whalen-Bridge National University of Singapore