Playing the Dozens and Consuming the Cadillac: Ralph Ellison and Civil Rights Politics

Abstract

This article challenges long-standing narratives of Ralph Ellison’s response to civil rights-era struggles as one of quietism, conservatism, or apolitical aestheticism. Focusing on a key episode early in Ellison’s Three Days before the Shooting …, in which a jazz musician burns his Cadillac on a US senator’s lawn to protest the senator’s racist pronouncements, I argue that Ellison adopts expressive strategies of black vernacular culture—the ritual of the dozens and African American automotive consumption—to explicate a singular conception of literary commitment, one that seeks political effectiveness precisely within formal autonomy. By tracing the presence of the Cadillac in US rhetorics of race, the nature of the dozens as a formally hermetic expressive form, and the signifying potential of conspicuous consumption, I demonstrate the radical and utopian content of Ellison’s politics in the postwar era.