| This project connects the literary work of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright to contemporary conversations about white supremacy in black intellectual scholarship. The conversations raise issues of pessimism and optimism with respect to the possibility addressing racial injustice and inequality within the United States, and depth anti-black racism within American institutions, cultures and practices. These debates rearticulate James Baldwin's question, "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" This project seeks to connect Baldwin's question to his literary influences in Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son, as well as contemporary scholarship engaging this question, particularly Cornel West's "Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization" and Frank B. Wilderson III's "Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?". |
