The first time I read Invisible Man,
I was entranced by its black-white symbolism, which seemed to never
end, but instead simply became smaller and subtler, like a reflection in
an elevator’s facing mirrors. When I reread it, I still felt that pull
of someone who yearns to solve a labyrinth, but I also saw myself, more
clearly, in it: I understood its contours in a deeper way, the way one
can at once be forgotten and feared by a society, invisible and
incandescent, hated either way. An invisible-visible woman, a trans
woman with a foot in two countries, two shifting realities.
The title, in its semblance to Wells’ fantastical novel, captured a
country’s contradictions. I loved it. It wasn’t just that Ellison was a
brilliant stylist, with an obsessive but efficacious eye for showing,
through those repeating mirrors, America’s wondrous and terrible
symmetries, how blackness was inextricably intertwined with almost every
facet of American history, as he would venture into more detail in an essay for TIME,
in which he argued, rightly, that America would be unthinkable without
black people, despite the quixotic fantasies of certain white Americans. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/the-other-invisibles-of-ralph-ellisons-invisible-man/
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