Trey Ellis
Encyclopedia
Trey Ellis is an American
novelist, screenwriter
, professor
, and essayist.
He was born in Washington D.C. and attended Stanford University.
Structurally, the novel makes extensive use of structure. Largely a metafictional work, Ellis moves between a more post-modern, deconstructed style and a more traditional, black female style through the voices of fictional authors Wellington and Ishee Ayam. Ellis' exaggerated representations of each style is humorous, essentially complicating the hegemonic artistic voice of the Black Arts Movement.
As a black nerd, Earle complicates traditional ideas of black masculinity. He occupies a place as an intellectual outsider, excluded from the mainstream, and yet the nerd identity is hyper-white. This questions how alternative black masculinities that deviate from Black Power's image can fit into an identity of blackness.
He is also the author of the novels Home Repairs (1993) and Right Here, Right Now (1999), which received an American Book Award
. His latest book is Bedtime Stories: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Single-Fatherhood (2008), a memoir of his life as a single father of two.
, and Good Fences, starring Danny Glover
and Whoopi Goldberg
, which was shortlisted for the PEN
award for Best Teleplay of the year, and was nominated for a Black Reel award. In 1994, he co-wrote The Inkwell under the pen name "Tom Ricostronza".
, Playboy
, The Washington Post
, The Los Angeles Times and GQ, among other places. He is a regular blog
ger on The Huffington Post
and lives in Manhattan
, where he is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia University
Graduate School of Film.
Ellis writes: "Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world."
Ellis appropriates the somewhat offensive term mulatto
in his creation of rhetoric to describe this contemporary black locus as a means to challenge prevalent notions of multiracial; or in this case, "culturally multiracial", black people falling subject to the fate of the tragic mulatto
. While prevalent as a stereotypical figure in 19th and 20th century American literature, the tragic mulatto need not exist in postmodern society. The NBA, as characterized by Ellis, allows space for the cultural mulatto to perform a self-defined, authentic form of identity that does not rely on the self-deluding practice of negating his or her blackness. Relatedly, the cultural mulatto need not perform a "superblackness" to overcompensate for "acting white" or to gain cultural credibility from the black community. Cultural mulattos exist in great numbers and, fueled by the ideology of the NBA, space for hybridity is opened and, subsequently, feelings of dislocation in a strictly dichotomous society are collectively obliterated.
Through their skills that allow successful navigation in both the white and black social spheres, the cultural mulattos that typify the NBA are using their access to higher education and various breeds of dominant cultural capital to make "atypically black" art and earn respect devoid of essentialist racial categorizations.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
novelist, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
, professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
, and essayist.
He was born in Washington D.C. and attended Stanford University.
Novels and memoirs
His first novel, Platitudes, was published in 1988 and reissued by Northeastern University Press in 2003, along with his 1989 essay "The New Black Aesthetic". Platitudes follows the story of Earle, a black, private high-school student in New York City. The novel itself wrestles with many concepts outlines in "The New Black Aesthetic," namely the existence of the cultural mulatto. Earle, as a second generation middle-class, black nerd, embodies this identity—on his visit to Harlem he feels entirely out of place. Alongside this narrative is the story of Dorothy, a black, private high-school student who does live in Harlem and yet can navigate easily in her largely white social circles.Structurally, the novel makes extensive use of structure. Largely a metafictional work, Ellis moves between a more post-modern, deconstructed style and a more traditional, black female style through the voices of fictional authors Wellington and Ishee Ayam. Ellis' exaggerated representations of each style is humorous, essentially complicating the hegemonic artistic voice of the Black Arts Movement.
As a black nerd, Earle complicates traditional ideas of black masculinity. He occupies a place as an intellectual outsider, excluded from the mainstream, and yet the nerd identity is hyper-white. This questions how alternative black masculinities that deviate from Black Power's image can fit into an identity of blackness.
He is also the author of the novels Home Repairs (1993) and Right Here, Right Now (1999), which received an American Book Award
American Book Award
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...
. His latest book is Bedtime Stories: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Single-Fatherhood (2008), a memoir of his life as a single father of two.
Film
His work for the screen includes the Emmy nominated The Tuskegee AirmenThe Tuskegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen is a 1995 HBO television movie based on the exploits of an actual groundbreaking unit, the first African American combat pilots in the United States Army Air Force, that fought in World War II.-Plot:...
, and Good Fences, starring Danny Glover
Danny Glover
Danny Lebern Glover is an American actor, film director, and political activist. Glover is perhaps best known for his role as Detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon film franchise.-Early life:...
and Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg is an American comedian, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host.Goldberg made her film debut in The Color Purple playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won...
, which was shortlisted for the PEN
International PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
award for Best Teleplay of the year, and was nominated for a Black Reel award. In 1994, he co-wrote The Inkwell under the pen name "Tom Ricostronza".
Essays
His essays have appeared in The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, The Los Angeles Times and GQ, among other places. He is a regular blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger on The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...
and lives in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, where he is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
Graduate School of Film.
Additional work
He has also done a critical study entitled "A Moveable Feast" (television documentary). South Carolina Educational Television/WETA-TV, 1991Platitudes
Trey Ellis is most famous for his first work of metafiction called Platitudes. In Platitudes, the story begins with an experimental Black writer by the name of Dewayne Wellington. He is trying to figure out how to write his novel. He scoffs at the mainstream image of "authentic blackness" by creating the character Earle, a chubby teenage New Yorker who only thinks about sex (that he is not having) and academics. This is a departure from the stereotypical young black male who is assumed to only care about girls/sex, basketball, and hip hop music. He is in all sense what Ellis calls the cultural mulatto. Earle is a black 16-year-old who lives and attends school in the wealthy neighborhoods of the Upper West Side, Manhattan. While Earle is phenotypically black, he is quite assimilated into white culture. While most of his surroundings and relationships are with white people, Earle is also portrayed as a nerd which is often regarded as having “white” attributes as well as being someone who is intelligent, lacks social skills, and has a hyper-focus on a particular field, in Earle’s case that is computer programming. However, Earle tries to explore his black roots when he visits the diner in Harlem where he meets Dorothy for the first time. Dorothy is the attractive female character Dewayne creates. She attends the private St. Rita’s School for Girls in Manhattan. Although she lives in inner-city, Harlem, she socializes and attends school on the primarily white side of the city. Dorothy is a part of the popular crowd at school and wants to live the wealthy lifestyle despite her background. After asking for advice on how to write his novel, he encounters Isshee Ayam, an African American feminist writer. She ridicules his works and attempts to "correct" his mistakes by creating her own renditions of the story with more feminist elements. She changes the setting of the story to rural Lowndes County, Georgia as well as most of the characters' traits. As the story goes on, Wellington compromises some of his original ideas to accommodate some of Ayam's preferences. Simultaneously, this happens while a relationship buds between Dewayne Wellington and Isshee Ayam. All in all, a majority of the events that happen in the story of Earle and Dorothy are an indirect reflection of the dynamics of Dewayne Wellington's relationship with Isshee Ayam. In the end, as Earle and Dorothy reconnect and consummate their relationship, Isshee and Dewayne do as well when Isshee visits Dewayne in the last chapter of the novel.The New Black Aesthetic
Trey Ellis is also known for the small piece he wrote about the New Black Aesthetic (NBA). The NBA is a concept that describes the change in the overall image of "blackness" that has emerged in our society in the past few decades. He is saying that there is a more broad way to characterize middle class black today. Now, for example, black students go to colleges to be art majors rather than always pursuing a law degree or going to medical school upon graduating because their parents have given them the means to do so. In this short piece, Ellis includes interviews from black filmmaker, Spike Lee, as well as the black band, Fishbone. He uses these as examples of thriving hybrids, or people who don’t leave behind their culture to be successful. He also talks about the concept of the "cultural mulatto," or someone who can relate to multiple cultures the same way a multiracial person can relate to their different heritages. He refers Whitney Houston and Lionel Richie as "neutered mutations" that chose to conform and commercialize their once soulful style just so they could maximize their profits by appealing to multiple cultures.Cultural mulatto
The phrase, coined by Ellis in his essay "The New Black Aesthetic," refers to a black individual who possesses the ability to thrive and successfully exist in a white society while simultaneously maintaining all facets of his or her complex cultural identity.Ellis writes: "Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world."
Ellis appropriates the somewhat offensive term mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...
in his creation of rhetoric to describe this contemporary black locus as a means to challenge prevalent notions of multiracial; or in this case, "culturally multiracial", black people falling subject to the fate of the tragic mulatto
Tragic mulatto
The Tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries. The "tragic mulatto" is an archetypical mixed race person , who is assumed to be sad or even suicidal because they fail to completely fit in the "white world" or the...
. While prevalent as a stereotypical figure in 19th and 20th century American literature, the tragic mulatto need not exist in postmodern society. The NBA, as characterized by Ellis, allows space for the cultural mulatto to perform a self-defined, authentic form of identity that does not rely on the self-deluding practice of negating his or her blackness. Relatedly, the cultural mulatto need not perform a "superblackness" to overcompensate for "acting white" or to gain cultural credibility from the black community. Cultural mulattos exist in great numbers and, fueled by the ideology of the NBA, space for hybridity is opened and, subsequently, feelings of dislocation in a strictly dichotomous society are collectively obliterated.
Through their skills that allow successful navigation in both the white and black social spheres, the cultural mulattos that typify the NBA are using their access to higher education and various breeds of dominant cultural capital to make "atypically black" art and earn respect devoid of essentialist racial categorizations.