SOURCE: Urquhart, Troy A. “Ellison's ‘King of the Bingo Game.’” Explicator 60, no. 4 (summer 2002): 217-19.

In the following essay, Urquhart discusses the significance of naming in “King of the Bingo Game,” which “suggests that the relationship between white and black remains a relationship between colonizer and colonized.”

In her essay “Playing in the Dark,” Toni Morrison asserts that in a “wholly racialized society” “there is no escape from racially inflected language” (927). In a postcolonial view of American society, this assertion suggests both that the dichotomous relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is inescapable and that this relationship is reinforced or even constructed by language. The act of naming, then, enforces ideological hierarchies, including what Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt term “the socially constructed binary of black/white” in American culture (37). While John F. Callahan, editor of a collection of Ralph Ellison's short stories, describes Ellison's “King of the...