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.