• "Simply by Reacting?": The Sociology of Race and Invisible Man's Automata

    Author(s):
    Scott Selisker (see profile)
    Date:
    2011
    Group(s):
    American Literature, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American, Speculative and Science Fiction, TC Race and Ethnicity Studies, TC Science and Literature
    Subject(s):
    American literature--African American authors, American literature, Literature and science, Race relations, Ethnic relations
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    automaton, African American literature, Sociology of race and ethnic relations
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6WQ1T
    Abstract:
    This essay considers Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison's other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with Ellison's and others' resistance to a midcentury ideology of scientism. This scientism, which characterizes both the sociological construction of the so-called “Negro problem” and Ellison's representation of a scientifically oriented Communist Party, takes on its literary expression through Ellison's satirical use of the automaton. The novel repeatedly stages the ethical and ontological dilemma in which viewers are momentarily uncertain whether they are looking at a person or an automaton, which the essay links with Ellison's numerous discussions of African American political views as “reactions” rather than actions in their own right. For Ellison, Myrdal and the novel's Communist Brotherhood share a perspective limited by a “scientific” distance from, and instrumental treatment of, African Americans. This link, the essay argues, recasts the novel's anti-Communism as primarily a resistance to scientism at the same time that it foregrounds a new set of historical contexts through which to see one of the novel's main series of motifs.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1215/00029831-1339872
    Publisher:
    Duke University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2011-10-10
    Journal:
    American Literature
    Volume:
    83
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    571 - 596
    ISSN:
    0002-9831,1527-2117
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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