Ralph Ellison: Melancholic Visibility and the Crisis of American Civil Rights
![handle is hein.journals/jrllpc5 and id is 122 raw text is: Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture, Vol. V, No. 1 (2010), pp. 119-139
Ralph Ellison:
Melancholic Visibility and the Crisis of
American Civil Rights,
ANNE ANLIN CHENG++
The trope of invisibility has long provided a central motif in the literary
representations of racial minorities. From Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man' to Toni
Morrison's The Bluest Eye,2 the metaphor of invisibility has come to symbolize
the consequences of racial blindness, designed to alert us to the repercussions of
social and legal exclusion in American history. Yet the nature of racial blindness
and its antidote social visibility have never been as simple as the binary terms
imply. Involving a restless and often vexing interplay between perception and
projection, recognition and disavowal, the value of racial visibility and invisibility
can only emerge in relation to one another even as such appearance of meaning
almost always immediately problematize the signification against which it has
defined itself. White visibility, for instance, relies on the invisibility and
assumed normality of whiteness, while black invisibility acquires its shape
precisely through its very visibility as difference. Thus the rhetoric of becoming
visible that has energized so much of progressive racial politics often elides the
contradictions underpinning social visibility and remains ineffective in the face
of the phenomenological, social, and psychical paradoxes inhering in what it
means to be visible.
When we turn to one of the primal texts about American racial visibility, Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man, what we find is not the opposition between seeing and
not-seeing, but a symptom of the dynamic of mutual projection structuring race
relations in this country and of a crisis of democratic recognition that goes right
to the heart of how we legislate civil and individual rights. In the Prologue to
Invisible Man, we find the narrator's explication of the novel's central metaphor
by telling us that he is invisible because [white] people refuse to see him.3 The
' Portions of this article were previously published in the following works by Anne Anlin Cheng: Anne Anlin
Cheng, Ralph Ellison and the Politics of Melancholia, in CAMBRIDGE COMPANION To RALPH ELLISON (Ross Posnock, ed.,
Cambridge Univ. Press 2005) and ANNE ANLIN CHENG, THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE: PSYCHOANALYSIS, ASSIMILATION, AND
HIDDEN GRIEF (Oxford Univ. Press 2001). This article is published with the permission of Cambridge University Press
and Oxford University Press, Inc. Relevant passages are covered by copyright @ 2005 Cambridge University Press
and Copyright @ 2001 Oxford University Press.
Professor of English and Member, Core Faculty, Center for African American Studies, Princeton University.
RALPH ELLISON, INVISIBLE MAN (1990) [hereinafter INVISIBLE MAN].
2 TONI MORRISON, THE BLUEST EYE (2007).
3 INVISIBLE MAN, supra note 1, at 3](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jrllpc5&div=12&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Ralph Ellison: Melancholic Visibility and the Crisis of American Civil Rights
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