Abstract

This dissertation traces the vicissitudes of the relation of race to American pragmatism, not only in pragmatism's social theory but in its linguistic theory and creative manifestations. I concur with recent critics who argue that the central tenets of pragmatism are developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson prior to being christened as pragmatism. However, I diverge from that criticism in locating the development of "Emersonian pragmatism" in Emerson's abolitionist activities and antislavery writings, where he considers how a model of textual production might function in the service of emancipation and democracy. My contention is that after Emerson---in the work of major pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey---race largely drops from view. The absence of a discussion of race constitutes a crisis because pragmatists continue to insist that pragmatism is the philosophical and aesthetic manifestation of a desire for democracy. The work of William Carlos Williams, for instance, is characterized by a contradiction between his pervading interest in pragmatism and his problematic relationship with jazz and African-American culture. The failings of Williams' "pragmatic modernism" help explain the importance of Ralph Ellison's intervention into pragmatist discourse. In his essays and in Invisible Man, Ellison carries on a dialogue with Emerson and Kenneth Burke, through which he rearticulates pragmatism's connection to African-American culture. I relate Ellison's description of how "the jazz band put democracy into aesthetic action" to the work of Amid Baraka and Frank O'Hara, writers united during the 1950's and early '60's by their interest in both pragmatism and jazz. I argue that the activities of Baraka and O'Hara provide a particularly useful platform from which to consider what Ellison's re-visioning of pragmatism might mean to postmodernist aesthetics. In thinking across traditions and genres I propose an alternative lineage of pragmatists whose concern with race and democracy informs their experimental aesthetic