Abstract

The goal of this project is to outline the emergence of blues philosophy in contemporary American letters. The study begins by constructing a genealogy of American philosophers concerned with the issues of identity, race, and social hope. The subsequent chapters uncover the ways in which the blues has become a framework for American artists to confront the philosophical ironies attached to American identification, mourn and memorialize past loss, sing the body electric, and narrate heroic struggle. This is a particularly charged field of inquiry. My claim is that this Negro-engineered American philosophy of improvisation and antagonistic cooperation is at the core of cultural production in the West, especially in American literature during the second half of the twentieth century. ;The essays presented here "play" on and delineate the pragmatist qualities and aesthetics of the blues through various texts. After setting the themes of the dissertation through an examination of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, I outline the extensions and riffs that American writers, such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, and Jamiaca Kincaid, make on the Ellisonian philosophical approach. As a philosophy, the blues emerges from the historical experience of African Americans in Western hemisphere---it is the philosophy of the Black Atlantic. I will be tackling the shifty definitions of postmodern aesthetics in an attempt to posit the blues as a more culturally appropriate angle from which to discuss the questions concerning contemporary human existence. In this study attempts to present the blues as an intellectual alternative to the now status quo approaches of postmodernism and postcolonialism. This project is important because it charts an American philosophy little acknowledged by the larger critical community