Word: ellison
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They are the great romantics of the black tradition: what Ellington played, Bearden painted; what Bearden painted and Ellington played, Ellison put into words. Together their work expressed the belief that the ultimate source of a sublime African-American art was to be found in the vernacular--the myths and folktales, the language games such as the dozens and signifying, and the sorrow songs and blues out of which each fashioned a sophisticated jazz idiom. And most audaciously of all, each believed the fundamental structuring principle of Negro art--improvisation--was also the essence of American democracy. The ultimate Americans...
Perhaps it is only fitting that Juneteenth (Random House; 368 pages; $25), Ralph Ellison's long-awaited second novel, almost 50 years in the making, would be published in 1999, the centennial year of Duke Ellington's birth. For Ellington and Ellison, along with the painter Romare Bearden, were practitioners of a shared aesthetic, three titans of an African-American modernism, embodying in their work elegance, eloquence and elan...
...Ellison (who had tried both music and painting as careers) did not introduce modernism to his chosen art form as Ellington did. Rather, he introduced black music to literary modernism, creating in his first novel, Invisible Man, a symphony of magisterial jazz riffs centered on Carl Jung's claims that "the Negro...lives within [the American's] skin, subconsciously," and on the firm belief, shared with Bearden and Ellington, that it is the self--the black self, however buffeted by racism--that is the ultimate repository of one's fate. Destiny and liberation were inextricably tied to the solitary will...
Dedicated by Ellison "to that Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes"--he proudly and defiantly resisted the successive fads to rename that tribe--Juneteenth turns on the complex relationship between an ex-jazzman and trickster turned preacher, Alonzo Hickman, and his white--or nearly white--foster child, Bliss. Hickman reluctantly agrees to midwife and then raise this child of a white woman whose false accusation of rape had caused his brother to be lynched. Bliss, though lovingly nurtured by his stepfather, eventually runs away in search of his lost mother and later transforms himself into Senator...
...individuals become more litigious in their attitudes, the intersection between College disciplinary policy and the legal process becomes more complex for this school and for every school." said committee member Peter T. Ellison, associate dean of the Faculty...