Invisible Man

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• Leerjaar 5

America: Race in the early 20th century.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

• published in 1952
•  It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by the African Americans in the early twentieth century. 
• Black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism.
• Also, the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.

Booker T. Washington

• born in slavery in 1856
• Freed after the Civil war was over. 
• an  activist
• 1890-1915: dominant leader in the black community and of the black elite. 
• practical education: basic hygiene. 
• belief: next to academic skills, blacks had to learn a trade, this could cause racial uplift within the black community, but also more respect for blacks

Booker T. Washington

• He believed:  Blacks needed time to develop educationally and economically,  and whites should help them in every way possible. 
• Southerners kept throwing up barricades to prevent progress. 
• People became critical of Washington. 

Why would black people be critical of Booker T Washington?

Invisible Man

• the theme of a person's search for their identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man, first in the Deep South and then in the New York City of the 1930s. 

• Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.

Ralph Ellison

• March 1st, 1913 -  April 16th, 1994
• studied at Tuskagee Institute, an all-black university founded by Booker T Washington.
• was soon to find out that the institution was no less class-conscious than white institutions generally were.
• "Standing apart from the university's air of sanctimonious Negritude enabled him to write about it"
• was introduced to the black literary establishment with Communist sympathies

Ralph Ellison

Before Invisible Man, many (if not most) novels dealing with African Americans were written solely for social protest, most notably, Native Son and Uncle Tom's Cabin. By contrast, the narrator in Invisible Man says, "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either,"

 

He did not really belong to any group, like the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement.