Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) traces the life of its African-American male protagonist—significantly left unnamed—as he moves from college in the South to New York City. The experiences of the protagonist captures the ways in which African Americans were deemed “invisible” by whites in order to dehumanize and marginalize them in American life. Although Ellison addresses African-American leadership and cultural relations in the black community, his primary concern is to inspect and critique whites' use of a pejorative construction of African-American masculinity, particularly the stereotyping of black males as brutish and libidinous, to dominate the social and political power dynamic of post–World War II America.

Several scenes in the novel symbolically depict white America's stereotyping of African-American masculinity and marginalizing of black men. At one point, the protagonist is forced to participate in a boxing match before a white male audience in order to receive a briefcase and a scholarship to a black college. Before the match, the protagonist and nine other young African-American men are forced to watch what the white men believe to be black men's ultimate object of desire: a nude, white, female dancer. Forced to sexual arousal, the youths are objectified by the all-white male audience, who proceed to live out their own racist fantasies of the “black buck”and the “black brute”as they scream racial obscenities to spur the teenagers into battle. The protagonist, by performing as a brutish black body, conforms to the white audience's expectations and blinds them to his intellectual potential.

The scenes with the dancer and the boxing match include a strongly homoerotic element—and an accompanying critique of white male sexuality and power. Since homosexuality was stigmatized by mainstream American culture, having the white men gaze upon virile males in boxing gear not only grounds the whites' power in the objectification of black men, but also calls that power into question by grounding it in homoerotic desire. This message becomes more explicit later in the text, when the young Emerson, a covert white homosexual, offers the protagonist a job as his manservant when previous attempts to sexually lure the black youth fail.

The dominant theme of African-American male disempowerment is further illustrated when the protagonist is demoted from a leadership role in the Marxist Brotherhood, a white-led communist group, because he resists their ideological practice of conflating the racial and economic oppression of African Americans. In the process, he is again reduced from a position of intellectual empowerment to the status of a sexual object, subjected to the sexual advances of several white women attempting to fulfill their fantasies of being overtaken by a libidinous black “buck.” The protagonist reflects on a tradition of African-American manhood sexually subjugated to white women (and thereby emasculated) through performance as servants, chauffeurs, and Pullman porters.

Invisible Man examines the way in which African-American males are often objectified and eroticized by the dominant white culture in terms of physicality and sexuality, while at the same time denied power and autonomy—the definitive measures of manhood mandated by the white patriarchal system. Ellison's central message was that African-American men would achieve this manhood only when they achieved true visibility and equality. His message foreshadowed the declaration, “I AM A MAN” proclaimed by black men during the civil rights movement as they demanded full representation and equal rights for all African Americans.

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