Ralph Ellison's exceptional diaspora: The view from Rome

Abstract

“Ralph Ellison's Exceptional Diaspora” seeks to connect Ellison's intellectual and literary vision of African American culture to the world-historical events of the mid-fifties via the writer's experience in Rome. The work Ellison produced while in residence at the American Academy of Rome – from 1955 to 1957, reveals a radical intellectual, who tenaciously supports the Civil Rights Movement and promotes a transnational approach to the understanding of African American culture and politics, despite the pressure of Cold War politics. The article focuses on the essays “Change the Joke and Split the Yoke” and “Society, Morality and the Novel,” read in conjunction with Ellison's correspondence with fellow writer and friend Albert Murray and with the interview with Preuves, which was occasioned by his participation at the conference of the World Congress for Cultural Freedom in Mexico City in 1957. Thus, the article highlights a little-known Ellison, whose continuous effort to shed light on American reality is mediated by the attention to anticolonial movements, the history of Western imperialism, and its global cultural consequences for the people of the African Diaspora.