#albert murray

Albert Murray interviewed by Kalamu ya Salaam at Neo Griot. Interview: Alber tMurray On Ralph Ellison & The Aesthetics Of Wrting

(Hillwood Museum)

Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison

Murray profoundly influenced 20th century discourse around race in the United States, challenging theories of Black separatism and penning essays on topics such as the fundamental ways the USA's culture is intertwined with Black experiences. It's worth noting that while I refer to it that way, he emphasized calling himself an American, and didn't use "Black" or "African American."

This is what I meant in my last post, and what I was predicting back in my 2014 essay on the now somewhat and justly forgotten film Her (an essay on Ulysses in disguise): the at least partial confluence of certain long-term trends on left and right toward a state-corporate merger interested in every sense in the disaggregation of the self into modular control units. Blake Smith gets at something similar here. (At the risk of vulgar criticism, the main difference between the woke and the neoreactionaries in America is a surface difference in racial politics: the woke want the coming posthumanism to be explicitly pro-black, the neoreactionaries want it explicitly anti-black, though either way it’s equally dehumanizing for sensibilities reared on the old liberalism—see, for example, Albert Murray.) The puzzle piece I haven’t yet found a place for—what I was alluding to in this darkly cryptic post—is the strange role Catholicism seems to be playing on both sides.

Albert Murray, JAZZ (episode 5)

Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy, 151

Now and then someone does something absolutely necessary that you may not have even known was possible until it happens and then you can’t imagine why it hadn’t happened sooner. The great Library of America has done it again. Just added to their earlier volume of Collected Essays and Memoirs, we now have the Collected Novels and Poems of Albert Murray. An American master has finally received his due. Read Albert Murray.