ABSTRACT
Like Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison regards hybridization as a positive consequence of disparate cultures blending within the pluralist setting of the United States. Its emergence as an instrument of determining Americanness in Invisible Man (1952), however, represents a sharp rejoinder to the efforts of immigrant intellectuals and activists in the novel, whose brands of uprooted, hybrid cosmopolitanism indirectly anticipate those that Ground privileges. In this chapter, I argue that Invisible Man registers the encounter of opposing versions of national identity formation: one based upon external contributions to American composition; the other based upon their internal equivalent. This convergence occurs in the tense coincidence of the Great Migration and the New Immigration to 1930s New York, which Ellison details through edgy interactions between representative figures of these two events.1
