Global Ralph Ellison: Transnational Aesthetics and Politics ed. by Tessa Roynon and Marc C. Conner (review)

Scholarship on Ralph Ellison flourished across the 2010s, and one of the high-water marks was the International Ralph Ellison Symposium at the University of Oxford in September 2017. Organized by Tessa Roynon and Marc C. Conner, the symposium brought together Ellison scholars from around the world to reassess the author in global frameworks at Oxford's Rothermere American Institute. Now, Roynon and Conner present a new edited collection titled Global Ralph Ellison: Aesthetics and Politics Beyond US Borders, with perspectives by eleven scholars from six countries and four continents (5).

While the volume is related to the symposium, two-thirds of the symposium's papers are not included here, and at least two essays were not part of the symposium. Containing eight original essays, as well as an Introduction by Roynon and an Afterword by Conner, Global Ralph Ellison consists of two distinct sections. "Part I: The World in Ellison: Migratory Intertexts" explores Ellison's engagement with transnational literary and intellectual influences, including Henry James (Sam Halliday), Jane Ellen Harrison (Bryan Crable), Ovid (Roynon), and Dostoyevsky (Stephen Rachman). Notably, all of the essays in Part I make use to varying degrees of access to the trove of the Library of Congress's Ralph Ellison Reading Room, which houses Ellison's personal library, and many of the books contain annotations and other marginalia. All four of the essays in Part I thus become, as one author in the collection puts it, exercises in "[r]eading over Ellison's shoulder" (142). "Part II: Ellison in the World: Translation and Receptions" provides global accounts on how Ellison's reception and influence around the world, specifically in South Africa (Aretha Phiri), the USSR and post-Soviet Russia (Olga Panova), East and West Germany (Christa Buschendorf and Nicole Lindenberg), and Japan (Michio Arimitsu and Raphaël Lambert). The "first full-length work to consider the transnational dimensions of Ellison's life" (2), the volume deliberately undertakes a "chiasmic" structure (3). As Roynon writes in her Introduction, the volume "challenges a truism that … has continued to dominate Ellison scholarship," that Ellison's much observed "commitment to [the] democratic ideals" of the US somehow make him "'exceptionally American' to the extent to the extent that both culture and politics outside of the USA are of only secondary importance in his writing" (2). Following the broader transnational turn in twenty-first-century American studies, the volume aspires to "liberate Ralph Ellison from the imposed confines of US borders" (6).

Part I explores the global texts that inform Ellison's work, some of which have lacked dedicated critical attention. In "Ralph Ellison and the Divergent African American Claims on Henry James," Sam Halliday revisits the impact of the work of James on Ellison, as well as on two other writers from his milieu, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Ellison became interested in James during the 1930s, the years of his greatest involvement with the left, and against the grain of dominant criticism from the time of James as a dusty elite. Although James wrote relatively little about African Americans outside abolitionist discussions in The Bostonians, he nevertheless provided a representational model for Ellison, who cited James's attraction to the portrayal of "super subtle fry" in his updated preface to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man. For Ellison, it was problematic that depictions of Black characters in American literature too rarely displayed the complexity attributed to Jamesian types. Ellison was also interested in James's depictions of the "complex fate" of the American abroad, a Jamesian couplet Ellison honored in the title of his essay "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," as well as in reflections in his unpublished autobiography.

Bryan Crable's "Ellison's Appropriation of Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis: From Sacrifice to Sacrament" recovers another underrecognized influence on Ellison, the Cambridge Ritualist's most influential work Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), which explores ritual...