Mapping the Invisible: Critical Perspectives on Invisibility

Abstract

In the 60 year span between the publication of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) and the present day, the metaphor of invisibility, initially used by Ellison to describe the feeling that black Americans had of being second class citizens, has been taken up and applied to other minority groups both inside and outside the US. Set in pre-civil rights America, Ralph Ellison’s novel chronicles the trajectory of a black man who is aware that his ethnic conspicuousness consigns him to social invisibility in the eyes of white Americans with racial prejudices. The novel, which provides an insightful entry point into the complex dynamics of racial otherness evidences some of the salient traits of ethnic visibility turned into metaphorical invisibility as well as the contextual makeup and psychological consequences of the de facto ‘invisibility’ of the ethnically conspicuous other. The metaphorical meaning endorsed by visibility in this reputedly seminal text on race relations has traversed the fields of ethnic studies and postcolonial writing either explicitly or in a slightly more veiled manner. More recently the notion has been theorized by French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc who acknowledges his intellectual debt to Ellison whilst probing further into the workings of social invisibility.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodyless heads you see sometimes in circus side shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

(Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952, 7)¹