Литература двух Америк (Nov 2018)
Invisible in the White House: Rethinking Ellison through Barack Obama’s Global Reading List
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.
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