Invisible in the White House: Rethinking Ellison through Barack Obama’s Global Reading List
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 82(092)
- DOI:
10.22455/2541-7894-2018-5-151-163
- Abstract:
For readers of Ralph Ellison, the ascent and presidency of Barack Obama had special resonance. Not only is Obama, too, a reader of Ellison, the memoir Dreams from My Father (1995) contains structural echoes of Invisible Man, and observers have long acknowledged continuities between Ellison and the former US president’s political style. Shortly before the 2008 election, David Samuels wrote in The New Republic that Obama’s “blank screen” approach to his own racial identity make him a descendent of Invisible Man; and in the recent biopic Barry (2016), a young Obama is portrayed reading Invisible Man beside a basketball court, where he picks up the nickname “Invisible.” Timothy Parrish even claims that when Obama was elected, “the nation had elected and was pursuing his [Ellison’s] vision.” The oft-cited Ellison-Obama association helps to explain the disappointment many Ellison fans felt when Obama, speaking with the NY Times’ Michiko Kakutani about his White House reading list shortly before leaving office, failed to name the writer. Yet the Kakutani interview, when taken in the context of Obama’s status as an heir to Ellison and what proved to be Obama’s decidedly global reading list, provides an opportunity to attune our perceptions of both figures. This account begins with Ellison’s theory of how presidents shape American cultural life, in his defense of Lyndon B. Johnson (“The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner” (1968)). It also reconsiders the Ellison-Obama association in the context of Obama’s global reading list and political orientation. Where does the domestic-policy-oriented, Ellisonian President Obama end, and where does the globalist Obama begin? Finally, if Obama’s most conspicuous omission in the Kakutani interview was Ellison, his most stunning admission was that his White House years made him an avid (if critical) reader of V.S. Naipaul. The talk concludes by considering Obama’s “realistic” Naipaul foreign-policy baseline in the context of Ellison’s famous restraint and caution.
- Keywords: Ralph Ellison, Barack Obama, V.S. Naipaul, Lyndon B. Johnson, Michiko Kakutani
- References:
[Barry 2016] – Barry, dir. by Vikram Gandhi, Black Bear Pictures and Cinetec Media, 2016. Netflix. Online at https://www.netflix.com/search?q=barry&jbv=80144803&jbp=0&jbr=0.
[Burns 1967] – Burns, James MacGregor. Letter to Ellison. 18 Dec 1967. Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Box I. 106. Folder 1.
[To Heal and Build 1968] – To Heal and to Build: The Programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson., ed. by James MacGregor Burns. McGraw-Hill, 1968.
[Crable 2016] – Crable, Bryan. “Invisible Man in the Age of Obama: Ellison on (Color) Blindness, Visibility, and the Hopes for a Postracial America.” The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Marc C Conner, Mississippi UP, 2016: 99–114.
[Ellison 1995] – Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1995.
[Ellison 1986a] – “The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner.” (1968) Going to the Territory 1986. New York: Vintage: 76-87.
[Ellison 1986b] – “Society, Morality, and the Novel.” (1957) Going to the Territory. 1986. New York: Vintage: 239-274.
[Hemingway 1963] – Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. (1935) New York: Scribner’s, 1963.
[Grandin 2014] – Grandin, Greg. “Obama, Melville, and the Tea Party.” New York Times (18 Jan., 2014): SR6.
[Kakutani 2017] – Kakutani, Michiko. “Obama on Books that Guided Him.” New York Times (15 Jan., 2017): A15.
[Naipaul 1989] – Naipaul, V.S. A Bend in the River. (1979) New York: Vintage, 1989.
[Naipaul 1990] – A Turn in the South. (1989) New York: Vintage, 1990. [Naipaul 2018] – “Two Worlds.” Nobel Prize Lecture, 7 Dec 2001, Swedish Academy, Stockholm. Online at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2001/ naipaul/lecture/.
[Obama 2004] – Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. (1995) New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2004.
[Parrish 2012] – Parrish, Timothy. Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America. Amherst, MA: Massachusetts UP, 2012.
[Rowe-Evans 1979] – Rowe-Evans, Adrian. “V.S. Naipaul: A Transition Interview.” (1979) Conversations with V.S. Naipaul, ed. Feroza Jussawalla. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997: 24-36.
[Samuels 2008] – Samuels, David. “Invisible Man.” The New Republic (21 Oct., 2008). Online at https://newrepublic.com/article/62148/invisible-man.
