Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Romare Bearden's Photomontages

Lamm, Kimberly

doi:10.1353/cal.2003.0094

Cited by 36 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…6 Borrowing from both Lacan's mirror stage and Fanon's study of the racial dynamics of narcissism, Hsuan Hsu, for example, has revisited the visual regime of racism in Ellison's novel, considering it as exemplifying both "identification"-i.e., narcissistic and often hostile projections on the part of both black and white subjects-and "surveillance"-which frames black bodies as objects 5 "Against the ideology that saw slavery as the most organic of social relations," as Michael Rogin (1985, 216) argues, "Melville conventionalized, as stage props, the symbols of authority which slaveowners insisted were theirs by nature." 6 See, for instance, Hogeland (1996), Hsu (2003), Hardin (2004), Kim (2005), Lamm (2003) and Leak (2005, 29-58).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Race Relations in Black and White: Visual Impairment as a Racialized and Gendered Metaphor in Ralp Ellison’s Invisible Man and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

Armengol

2017

Atlantis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While scholarship has increasingly acknowledged Ralph Ellison's indebtedness to Herman Melville, whose novella "Benito Cereno" (1855) was used as an epigraph to Invisible Man (1952), fewer scholars have discussed their common literary foci on blindness as a racial and gendered visual metaphor. Borrowing from the latest scholarship on whiteness and/as racial dominance, this article revisits "Benito Cereno" to show how Captain Delano's lack of belief in the possibility of a slave insurrection throughout the novella is itself an effect of racism, stemming mostly from the taken-for-granted-ness of white superiority, which Melville shows as distorting the whites' perceptions of blacks. In so doing, I will also explore Ellison's reworking of Melville's racial imagery in Invisible Man, which seems to extend the blindness metaphor to both black and white characters, re-presenting cross-racial blindness as reciprocal rather than unidirectional. As part of this argument, the article posits the inseparability of gender and race, suggesting that Ellison's depiction of white racism may be traced back to the (antebellum) definition of American manhood as free and nonenslaved, which Melville's novella both illustrates and undermines. I thus conclude that Ellison's and Melville's works skilfully anatomize, and critique, the discourses on whiteness and/as masculinity of their respective historical moments, highlighting their interdependence, but also their internal contradictions, which the black characters end up using to their own advantage. Si bien la crítica ha reconocido progresivamente la deuda de Ralph Ellison para con Herman Melville, cuya novela corta "Benito Cereno" (1855) fue usada como epígrafe a El hombre invisible (1952), menos estudiosos han analizado su interés común en la ceguera como metáfora visual marcada por la raza y el género. Usando la crítica más reciente sobre la raza blanca y/como dominación racial, este artículo revisa pues "Benito Cereno" para demostrar cómo la incredulidad del Capitán Delano ante la posibilidad de una insurrección de esclavos a lo largo de la novela es de hecho un efecto del racismo, derivado de su asunción de superioridad racial, que distorsiona las percepciones que los blancos tienen de los negros. En este sentido, se explora igualmente la reformulación de las imágenes raciales de Melville en El hombre invisible, que parece ampliar la metáfora de la ceguera a personajes blancos y negros indistintamente, re-presentando la ceguera interracial como recíproca antes que unidireccional. Como parte de este argumento, el artículo defiende la inseparabilidad de la raza y el género, mostrando cómo la representación del racismo blanco por parte de Ellison se remonta a la definición de la masculinidad estadounidense (anterior a la Guerra Civil) como libre y no esclavizada, que la novela de Melville ilustra a la vez que critica. Se concluye pues que tanto Melville como Ellison diseccionan hábilmente, y critican, los discursos alrededor de la raza blanca y/como masculinidad de sus momentos his...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Race Relations in Black and White: Visual Impairment as a Racialized and Gendered Metaphor in Ralp Ellison’s Invisible Man and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

Armengol

2017

Atlantis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison's Invisible Man

Jarenski

2010

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession

Clair¹

2022

American Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Because evictions pervaded US working-class cityscapes during the Great Depression, newspapers actively covered their developments and aftermaths, trading in eviction as a commodifiable experience that could entertain readers at the expense of pathologizing evictees and naturalizing summary process. Against this eviction reportage, this essay identifies a disconnected coterie of authors and artists who represented evictions and anti-eviction protests in their works, mapping out an urban geography that attends to the sociospatial and historical politics of forced ejection. In the writings of H. T. Tsiang and Ralph Ellison in particular, eviction constitutes a spatial politics of violence and exclusion, revealing the state’s protection of private property and bourgeois class interests over the well-being of its working-class and unemployed residents. Illustrating the sociospatial politics of eviction, these authors exploited and contested popular genres of eviction reportage, which narrated dispossession as a pathology of the poor to legitimate the state’s violent protection of private property. Challenging this pathologization as well as the scapegoating of Communist agitation, this essay contends that these texts account for how the juridical architecture of eviction itself creates the space and social mechanisms for anti-eviction resistance to take place. In so doing, this article positions housing and homeless justice as a politics central to the aesthetic experimentations and legacy of 1930s proletarian modernisms.

show abstract

Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Romare Bearden's Photomontages

Cited by 36 publications

References 25 publications

Race Relations in Black and White: Visual Impairment as a Racialized and Gendered Metaphor in Ralp Ellison’s Invisible Man and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

Race Relations in Black and White: Visual Impairment as a Racialized and Gendered Metaphor in Ralp Ellison’s Invisible Man and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison's Invisible Man

The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About