The Race to Primitivism: Ralph Ellison's Transatlantic Musings and the Italian Reception of Invisible Man

Abstract: This article traces the ways in which the discourse of primitivism runs through Ralph Ellison's view of 1950s Europe and the Italian reception of his novel Invisible Man , published in Italian in 1953. The overlaps in the understanding of the term primitive, widely used in the 1950s transatlantic world, give way to fundamental distinctions. Italian critics use primitivism to maintain African American literature at the margin of the Euro-American canon. By discounting its aesthetic features to focus on its sociological analysis, Italian reviewers foreclosed conversations of analogous experiences in Italian history, such as racial relations and colonialism. Ellison reverses the gaze to locate primitivism in postwar Europe itself, where the engagement with the recent horrors of its history and the worldviews that made them possible had yet to emerge.