Pragmatic Strategies of Resistance

Ralph Ellison's Radical Second Act

Bibliographic Data

ID21818986
AuthorsJohs Rasmussen (0009-0004-3635-3147, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume13
Pages59-77
Publication date2020-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
Venueaspeers emerging voices in american studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1865-8768 • E-ISSN: 2199-7284
PublisherThe Stacks Lib AAC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.54465/aspeers.13-06
OpenAlexW4312847556
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

This article argues that Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting... radicalizes John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy. To that end, the character arc of the black jazzman LeeWillie Minifees, who sets his expensive Cadillac aflame in the public sphere, discloses a dormant revolutionary zeal in Ellison’s political imagination. The two narrative spaces Minifees occupies—chapters four and fifteen—articulate a scathing critique of late capitalism and its attendant effect on US democracy. This article therefore posits that Minifees’s Cadillac-burning dissent constitutes a mode of creative democratic experimentation that is typical of the Deweyan pragmatic tradition, except that the jazzman’s actions suggest that the unmaking of the extant material conditions of existence is a precondition for African American subjects’ acquisition of proper political agency. In light of the analysis conducted herein, this article concludes that Minifees’s character arc should occasion a reassessment of Ellison’s textual politics, which are too often reduced to the thesis that black and white US citizens cannot escape their shared histories

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Democracy · Dissent · Epistemology · Extant taxon · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Race, History, and American Society

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