Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years

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I start with a key moment late in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, published in 1952. The moment comes near the end of the Harlem riot, a few pages before the protagonist falls underground, just before he transfixes with a spear the Afrocentric, Black nationalist agitator Ras, who is in turn hoping to hang our hero for allying himself to the white-directed Brotherhood. In a single sentence, the narrator sets himself against all the powers the book has conjured. These forces map as "un-American," subaltern-American, and hegemonic-American. They include Jack and the Brotherhood, which is a fictional group modeled on the Communist Party; they include Bledsoe, the president of the college for Negroes the narrator had been expelled from, modeled on Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee, which Ellison had attended; and they include the WASP establishment of Emerson and Norton. Here is the sentence:

I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. ¹

This passage signposts one beginning for a discursive cluster, involving identity, that is still alive, and troubling, today.

My inquiry is still work in progress, the protraction of a beginning commenced long ago and extended through the publication of several books. For my thoughts cast themselves again in the mode of critical genealogy: I want to think about the 1950s—and, you will see, from there back to the 1930s—because I need this past in order to think about our time. This selective presentism tries to find somewhat obscure moments of the past that, when brought to the present, both receive illumination and themselves cast light.

My inquiry takes the form of critical genealogy, but also my topic continues a problem I had defined in the last chapter of my book entitled Critical Genealogies. I argued then, in 1987, that the impasses of American critical thinking would not be worked through until we had gotten ourselves straight with the thirties. I was thinking of the ways in which accusations, from left and right alike, of communism and fellow traveling had dug scars so deep that it seemed thought could not cross the barriers. More broadly, the 1930s' political structure of Popular Front versus Fascism seemed to prefigure the animosity in the 1980s between populist intellectual ambitions of the Rainbow Coalition and the avant-garde tendencies associated with poststructuralism. In Criticism and Social Change (1983), Frank Lentricchia tried to diminish the then powerful appeal of Paul de Man by recovering the rhetorical criticism of Kenneth Burke, which was arguably equally radical—in the sense of fundamentally challenging—but certainly more left oriented. By 1987, some months after my Critical Genealogies had appeared, the world learned that de Man had been closer to fascism than any of us had known, or for the most part imagined, and in the nineties, scholars went back to first editions to discover that Burke was closer to communism than had been understood. Michael Denning, in his extraordinary and controversial The Cultural Front (1996), developed the case for this more deeply left-affiliated Burke, whom Denning designated "a leading American Marxist of the 1930s" and "the major cultural theorist of the Cultural Front." ²

Moreover, my "Huckleberry Finn" as Idol and Target (1997) itself is oriented around issues from the thirties in at least two crucial respects. First, I argue there that the hypercanonization of...