Writing of late 1990s Hollywood films (Independence Day, Men In Black) in which black men and white bond in the midst of the greater dangers represented by alien invasions and incipient cosmic disasters, Paul Gilroy in Against Race (2000) finds them expressing a ''real and widespread hunger for a world that is undivided by the petty differences we retain and inflate by calling them racial.'' A few lines later his book concludes by posing a utopian challenge to bring visions of ''planetary humanity from the future'' into the present and reconnect them with ''democratic and cosmopolitan traditions.'' If in our global, transnational age the renewed promise of cosmopolitan democracy has emerged as an animating ideal of popular, political, and academic culture, this is a way of saying that we are only now beginning to catch up with Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913-94).

Of all American writers, Ellison most forcefully took up the challenge of thinking beyond the imprisoning reductiveness of race and of liberating the cosmopolitan energies of democracy. It is apt that Ellison has long been ahead of us, for he found art and utopian thinking intimately aligned, describing the ‘‘true function’’ of both politics and fiction at their most serious as a ‘‘thrust toward a human ideal’’ which demands ‘‘negating the world of things as given.’’ Only then is the ‘‘potential’’ for effecting change possible.

Bringing Ellison and Arendt together could well comprise a chapter on yet another failed interaction between black and Jewish intellectuals. After all, on the two occasions when Ellison publically mentions Arendt it is in a less than favorable light. At the start of ''The World and the Jug,'' his compelling skewering of Irving Howe, Ellison remarks that Howe's earlier critique of Ellison is ''written with something of the Olympian authority that characterized Hannah Arendt's 'Reflections on Little Rock''' in the Winter 1959 issue of Howe's Dissent. Ellison is referring to her notorious misreading of black parents' attempts at integrating segregated grade schools as a parvenu effort at social climbing. Ellison's phrase ''Olympian authority'' should not be construed as a compliment; it is his sarcastic euphemism for the arrogance of those such as Howe and Arendt ''who would tell us the meaning of Negro life'' without ever bothering ''to learn how varied it really is.'' ''Evidently Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only 'real' Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious'' (Collected Essays 159).

Given his reputation as the impeccably patrician high priest of Art, Henry James would have seemed a prime target for demolition in the regime of multiculturalism that began in the 1980s. It sought to redefine literary criticism as cultural studies and to create an intellectual climate generally skeptical of both aesthetic value and canonical white male elitists. As a novelist said to regard Art as a saving consolation amid the vulgarity of modernity, Henry James would seem doubly damned. Yet his critical fortunes have held steady in the 1990s. Moreover, by and large, he has avoided serving as a nostalgic refuge for those in flight from the multicultural dispensation of race, class, and gender. Instead, cultural studies has in many ways been a tonic, stimulating revisionary readings that set aside his image as genteel aesthete to reveal the depth and originality of James's response to the social and cultural upheavals that marked his fin de siecle transatlantic world. Various aspects of the Jamesian sensibility and a number of works in his oeuvre can be, and have been, enlisted to argue for his continued currency. Here I examine only one of these aspects and works - James the cultural analyst, author of The American Scene - and argue that it has something especially important to contribute to ongoing contemporary debates about ethnicity, pluralism, and what it means to be an American in our era of identity politics.

“The turning was due to William James.” W. E. B. Du Bois here recalls, in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940), that his favorite Harvard professor encouraged him to move from studying philosophy to history and social problems (Du Bois 1986, 582). But, more important, this short sentence neatly distills James's catalytic impact not only on Du Bois but on two generations of Harvard students. The act of turning is Jamests most characteristic move, be it found in the turning or troping of words as “in itself an act of power over meanings already in place,” or as it animates the pragmatist's emblematic stance (Poirier 1987, 17). In James's famous words, the pragmatist “turns his back resolutely. . . upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction . . . from verbal solutions, fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward” facts, action, and power (P, 31).

A remarkable number of American intellectuals responded to James's invitation to turn. He directly influenced two generations of his Harvard students: Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, the sociologist Robert Park, the philosopher Alain Locke, Robert Frost, the jurist Learned Hand, and the cultural philosopher Horace Kallen. He also shaped the thinking of young contemporary admirers like the socialists Harold Laski, William English Walling, and Randolph Bourne, and, of course, younger pragmatists - John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Cooley - and psychologists James Mark Baldwin and John B. Watson.