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Nicole Lindenberg (Frankfurt am Main):
"'The Mystery of Power': Ellison’s Call, Bordieu’s Response"
Abstract
What turns a man of indeterminate race who was raised by a black minister in a black community into a racist politician? As the story of Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting… unfolds around the assassination of a racist Senator, it shows how social relations undermine African American claims for visibility. It seems as if Ellison had been meditating on this subject matter for over forty years in order to uncover how the mechanisms of slavery are prolonged and still take effect in present day America. When Ellison died in 1994, he left his second novel unfinished. Ellison’s literary executor John F. Callahan along with Adam Bradley examined thousands of pages to publish the novel as a fragment in 2010.
Fiction is able to reveal mostly invisible dimensions of power which I seek to trace and analyze in my thesis. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s central concepts (habitus, field, capital and symbolic violence) along with classic analytical instruments of literary criticism, I aim to identify the means of representation Ellison uses to expose how hidden mechanisms of power constitute racism. The novel itself explicitly addresses “the mystery of manners, style, and power” (TDBtS 694): The black character Sippy “become(s) obsessed” (TDBtS 694) with this “mystery” and starts an experiment with one of the central characters, Bliss, “to create himself a white man who measured up with his own high […] standards” (TDBtS 694). However, Bliss finally turns into the race-baiting Senator Adam Sunraider. In my talk I will take Sippy’s experiment as a starting point to examine the transformation from Bliss to Sunraider and to test the effectiveness of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.
Fiction is able to reveal mostly invisible dimensions of power which I seek to trace and analyze in my thesis. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s central concepts (habitus, field, capital and symbolic violence) along with classic analytical instruments of literary criticism, I aim to identify the means of representation Ellison uses to expose how hidden mechanisms of power constitute racism. The novel itself explicitly addresses “the mystery of manners, style, and power” (TDBtS 694): The black character Sippy “become(s) obsessed” (TDBtS 694) with this “mystery” and starts an experiment with one of the central characters, Bliss, “to create himself a white man who measured up with his own high […] standards” (TDBtS 694). However, Bliss finally turns into the race-baiting Senator Adam Sunraider. In my talk I will take Sippy’s experiment as a starting point to examine the transformation from Bliss to Sunraider and to test the effectiveness of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.
Bio
Nicole Lindenberg studied English and Philosophy at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main and University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduated in June 2011. From July 2011 till July 2012, she worked in the office of the American Institute of the Goethe-University and simultaneously started research on her Ph.D. thesis with the working title “’A Raft of Hope’ - From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting….” She has recently received a scholarship of the Hans-Böckler Stiftung for her project.