Roland Barthes’ notion of emotional “moments of truth” in literature can be a starting point for the study of the powers of literature, and more specifically of “ethnic” literature in the United States. John Edgar Wideman’s Reuben will serve as our point of entry, because of the intense wealth of emotions the novel elicits – at least, that it elicited in this reader. A first approach will follow Martha Nussbaum’s conception of “poetic justice” and Jacques Rancière’s “politics of literature”: I will try to show that literary emotions deserve attention in their own right, but can also be the building blocks for a virtual democracy that may allow us to unlearn discriminatory reflexes. Yet, since Wideman’s works radically question literary realism, the main reference invoked by the two above-mentioned critics, it might be worthwhile taking another path, one that tries to achieve freedom from the paradigm of “race” and domination through complex narrative forms inspired by the African conception of cyclical Great Time. Melancholy will be our guide, understood both as the feeling of grief and dispossession that gives the lie to the myth of Progress, and as a matrix for original creative forms, trickster-like and mythical. The truth of the literary moment may then be seen to flow from a “holographic” vision of the wholeness of humanity, uniting rather than separating culturally defined world views.