Black Solidarities

In an article published in the Liberator in 1967 and provocatively entitled, “Ralph Ellison: Shadow or Act?” South African poet laureate and transnational cultural activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, while lauding the artistic prowess of Invisible Man (1952), bemoans a dubious “kind of individualism” that finds expression also in the celebrated American author’s essayistic writing. Questioning whether he is a “Black writer or an American writer who happens to be Black,” Kgositsile, a key member of the Black Arts and Pan-Africanist Movements of the 1960s and 70s, further probes Ellison’s specific relatedness to the “peoples of Africa in our efforts to reshape that continent” (11) against racial oppression and inequality. Interrogating literature as a “site of struggle,” (“Culture and Resistance” 29), this article questions, as Kgositsile does, whether, in the context of oppression, an “artist’s ethics should [and can] be separable from his aesthetics” (“Ralph” 11). Reading his and Ellison’s ostensibly contradistinctive positions alongside each other, the article probes within their works the prospects for and limits of transnational black identity politics and solidarities

Nobel laureate · Oppression · Politics · The arts · African cultural and philosophical studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture