Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist

Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist examines Ralph Ellison’s body of work as an extended and ever-evolving expression of the author’s philosophy of temporality-a philosophy synthesized from the writings of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche that anticipates the work of Gilles Deleuze. Author Michael Germana presents Ellison’s theory of temporality and social change as going up against all forms of linear causality and historical determinism-a theory that views time as a multiplicity of dynamic processes, rather than a static container for the events of our lives. Integral to this theory is Ellison’s observation that the social, cultural, and legal processes constitutive of racial formation are embedded in static temporalities reiterated by historians and sociologists. Germana posits that Ellison’s critique of U.S. racial history is, fundamentally, a matter of time. This book shows how Ellison’s fiction, criticism, and photography reclaims technologies through which static time and linear history are formalized-in effect, revealing intensities implicit in the present that, if actualized, could help us act un-historically. The result is a reinterpretation of Ellison’s oeuvre, as well as an extension of Ellison’s ideas about the dynamism of becoming and the open-endedness of the future. Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist reveals the chaos of possibility lurking beneath the patterns of living we mistake for enduring certainties.