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
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Notes
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London: Penguin, 1965 [1952]).
Guillaume Le Blanc, L’Invisibilité Sociale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).
David, Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life (London: Granta Books, 2000).
Percival Everett, Erasure (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
Theorist Arjun Appadurai has stressed the necessity of distinguishing between the various types of diaspora in economic terms and in particular with the different contexts in which the diasporic journey is undertaken. Appadurai himself distinguishes between three types of diaspora, the dispora of hope, the diaspora of terror and the diaspora of despair. Other recent publications in the field of diasporic studies stress the historical context and therefore the type of migration involved; Vijay Mishra’s book The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (New York/London: Routledge, 2008)
and Mariam Pirbhai’s book Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific (2009) are noteworthy examples in this regard.
Jan Breman and Arvind Das. Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism (New Delhi 2000).
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics’, Environment and Urbanization 13: 2 (October 2001, 27).
For further discussion of the difference between child labour and child work, see Pryer (2003, 68) and J. Boydon, (‘Child work and Policy Makers: A Comparative perspective on the globalisation of childhood’, in A. James, and A. Prout, (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (London/New York: The Farmer Press, 1990).
Jane Pryer, Poverty and Vulnerability in Dhaka Slums: The Urban Livelihoods Study, Aldershot 2003.
In The Labouring Poor, Jan Breman argues that one of the main problems with informality is that workers have no contracts and no rights, but there is also another problem which is the gap within this class between those who get overexploited and some who are better off, the worst off being children and women (Breman, 181). See also Jan Breman and Arvind Das, Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism, New Delhi 2000.
For further discussion of invisible migrants see M. Abdul-Wali, They die Strangers. (Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin, 2001),
J.C. Bacher, Petrotyranny (Toronto: Dundern Press, 2000),
A.M. Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010).
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyds (eds) The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997).
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/ New York: Verso, 2004).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Colour: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
For further discussion of ‘whiteness’, as well as colour and American citizenship, see David Roediger, Coloured White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and The Wage of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American working class (London: Verso, 1999).
‘When the cream of Miami is the Cuban bourgeoisie, and the best students at MIT are Chinese, and not a candidate can stand before a democratic presidential convention without flashing his racial or ethnic credentials — when everybody sticks out and doesn’t seem to mind, perhaps Jews are less likely to worry about their sticking out; less likely in fact to stick out’ (Milbauer, Asher and Donald Watson (eds) Reading Philip Roth, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988, p. 4).
Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
For further discussion, see Cecilia Zanetta, The Influence of the World Bank on National Housing and Urban Politics: The Case of Mexico and Argentina in the 1990s (Aldershot, 2004, pp. 1994–6).
Paul Atkinson, A Handbook of Ethnography (London: Sage, 2001).
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence (London: Penguin, 1996).
Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (London: Virago Press, 1990 [1989]).
Hari Kunzru, Transmission (London: Penguin, 2004).
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006).
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyds, eds The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1997, 356).
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© 2014 Françoise Král
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Král, F. (2014). Mapping the Invisible: Critical Perspectives on Invisibility. In: Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401397_2
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