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Although he started his career affiliated with the Communist left in the 1930s, Ralph Ellison later claimed that he was only briefly drawn to "Marxist political theory" as a youthful "attraction." While admitting that he had written for Communistbacked journals in the 1930s and '40s and produced "propaganda having to do with the Negro struggle," he insisted he "never wrote the official type of fiction" (Collected Essays 58, 746). Accordingly, critics have distanced Ellison from Marxism on the assumption that the latter is a reductive, mechanistic doctrine at odds with Ellison's intellectual and aesthetic sophistication and largely unsuited to the complexities of U. S. contexts and African American experience. As Larry Neal put it: "Ellison had never really internalized Marxism in the first place. . . . [L]ucky for us, his work never took on the simplistic assertions of the literary Marxist" (60).1
Barbara Foley has recently argued that this characterization of Ellison, Marxism, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and the Depressionera proletarian literary movement is a politically motivated discursive project of postwar reaction. Ellison participated in that project by minimizing his radical past and crafting Invisible Man (1952) as a stock anticommunist indictment of the CPUSA's alleged racial chauvinism, authoritarianism, and doctrinaire simplicity. Cold War anticommunism, Foley shows, has since "invisibly entered the groundwater of U. S. cultural history," where it still shapes the unconscious assumptions critics and readers bring to Ellison (Wrestling 5). By historicizing Ellison's political reputation as a Cold War-era construction, Foley opens up new possibilities for rereading Ellison and Marxism and for reevaluating Ellison's Communist work.2
My essay revisits Ellison's Communist period to read him as a theorist working within intellectual parameters of Western Marxism. Using his 1930s' experiences, writings, associations, and influences, I delineate Ellison's theoretical problematic: the undergirding and enabling conceptual structure of his work, the scaffolding of his epistemological priorities. While he developed his distinct problematic under the auspices of 1930s' African American Communism, I argue that it continued to configure his thought (albeit in muted or mediated ways) after his postwar break from the left. My object of analysis entails tracing theoretical constructs embedded in Ellison's various writings (fiction, essays, interviews, correspondence) and putting those constructs in dialogue with an abstract body of...