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As a Black artist and intellectual, Ralph Ellison's chief preoccupation was with the world-transforming creativity of Black American culture and its relationship to creating American identity and history. Ellison's position was that there is no America or American culture without the work of the slaves and their descendants and that, in a very real sense, without the Black American experience, the idea of being or becoming American is impossible to understand. The great value of Sterling Bland's knowledgeable, well-written study is that, in the age of MAGA and George Floyd, it reminds us of Ellison's continuing relevance and importance for understanding contemporary American conflicts--he remains as vital as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or a Louis Armstrong solo. --Timothy Parrish, author of Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America As wide-ranging in its scope as it is precise in its analysis, In the Shadow of Invisibility offers a compelling new intellectual portrait of Ralph Ellison. Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. poses fundamental questions about Ellison's place in American literary and cultural history, and urges us to rethink his relationship with, and contributions to, central narratives about national identity. --Sam V. H. Reese, author of Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness

"""As a Black artist and intellectual, Ralph Ellison's chief preoccupation was with the world-transforming creativity of Black American culture and its relationship to creating American identity and history. Ellison's position was that there is no America or American culture without the work of the slaves and their descendants and that, in a very real sense, without the Black American experience, the idea of being or becoming American is impossible to understand. The great value of Sterling Bland's knowledgeable, well-written study is that, in the age of MAGA and George Floyd, it reminds us of Ellison's continuing relevance and importance for understanding contemporary American conflicts--he remains as vital as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or a Louis Armstrong solo.""--Timothy Parrish, author of Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America ""As wide-ranging in its scope as it is precise in its analysis, In the Shadow of Invisibility offers a compelling new intellectual portrait of Ralph Ellison. Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. poses fundamental questions about Ellison's place in American literary and cultural history, and urges us to rethink his relationship with, and contributions to, central narratives about national identity.""--Sam V. H. Reese, author of Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness"

"""The conversation surrounding Ralph Ellison (1914-94) has been going on for more than 70 years. . . . Bland enters the conversation in the spaces left unfilled by others--the proverbial invisible space. . . . To read Bland is to see Ellison in a new light 71 years later.""--CHOICE ""As a Black artist and intellectual, Ralph Ellison's chief preoccupation was with the world-transforming creativity of Black American culture and its relationship to creating American identity and history. Ellison's position was that there is no America or American culture without the work of the slaves and their descendants and that, in a very real sense, without the Black American experience, the idea of being or becoming American is impossible to understand. The great value of Sterling Bland's knowledgeable, well-written study is that, in the age of MAGA and George Floyd, it reminds us of Ellison's continuing relevance and importance for understanding contemporary American conflicts--he remains as vital as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or a Louis Armstrong solo.""--Timothy Parrish, author of Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America ""As wide-ranging in its scope as it is precise in its analysis, In the Shadow of Invisibility offers a compelling new intellectual portrait of Ralph Ellison. Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. poses fundamental questions about Ellison's place in American literary and cultural history, and urges us to rethink his relationship with, and contributions to, central narratives about national identity.""--Sam V. H. Reese, author of Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness"

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Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. is professor of English, African American studies, and American studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation and the editor of Understanding 19th-Century Slave Narratives and the three-volume African American Slave Narratives: An Anthology.

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