Athletics, Accommodation, and the Labor Question in Ralph Ellison's "Afternoon"

Abstract: In his 1940 short story "Afternoon" as well as reviews published in the early 1940s, Ralph Ellison contributed to conversations about Black labor in the Jim Crow era via a focus on the burgeoning field of professional sports. In their roleplaying as professional athletes, Ellison's young protagonists Buster and Riley engage in utopian performative acts that conjure an alternative world in which their labor is free of the demands of white patrons. Ellison's short fiction has been almost universally ignored by scholars, but "Afternoon" demonstrates Ellison's contribution to a key debate in mid-twentieth century Black life and culture, as well as his anticipation of the labor-based sports activism of recent years.