Title:	Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, classicism, and African American literature
Authors:	Patrice D., Rankine
Keywords:	American literature—African American authors—History and criticism
Issue Date:	2006
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin
Description:	This is a book of parts. The whole advances our understanding of the relationship between black literature and the classics (the body of European texts and ideas that I define more clearly later). I argue that, as the recent boom in interest in black classicism within the academic fields of Classical Studies and outside of it attests, black writers have always been interested in the classics and have at times used them to master their own American experience. Rather than an alien (or alienating) body of texts, black authors like Ralph Ellison have discoursed with the classics to engage immediate concerns of racism and oppression. Ulysses in Black takes the next step in black classicism. Studies in black classicism have thus far focused on turning attention toward such black Americans as William Sanders Scarborough, who was a slave and, later, a classical scholar; Ulysses in Black explores the end to which black writers engaged the classics. By extending Ulysses (another name for the Greek hero Odysseus) beyond the actual, classical hero with whom Ralph Ellison was enamored, I have arrived at a trope, that of “Ulysses in Black,” for the relationship between classical European myth and literature and African American literature. This is a relationship for which Ellison’s work is emblematic
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/10107
ISBN:	0-299-22000-1
Appears in Collections:	African Studies

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