An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Abstract

This article examines Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in light of recent thinking about Afrofuturism. As an international aesthetic movement concerned with the relations of science, technology, and race, Afrofuturism appropriates the narrative techniques of science fiction to put a black face on the future. In doing so, it combats those whitewashed visions of tomorrow generated by a global ‘futures industry’ that equates blackness with the failure of progress and technological catastrophe. Although Ellison claimed that his novel was not science fiction, I propose that he none-the-less deploys a range of science fictional tropes and references throughout his work in ways that profoundly anticipate later Afrofuturist thinking about the future of black history and culture. In the novel proper, Ellison uses these tropes and references to signify a number of dystopic futures where blackness is technologically managed. However, the opening and closing scenes of Invisible Man hold forth the possibility of a different relationship between technology, race, and art: by hiding out under New York City and stealing electricity to power his turntables, Ellison's protagonist creates a space outside linear time where he can begin to rewire the relations between past and present and art and technology. In doing so, he becomes, however tentatively, the figurehead for a hopeful new Afrofuture.

Keywords:

• Ralph Ellison
• Invisible Man
• Afrofuturism
• History of the future
• Futures industry
• Science fiction

Notes

For discussions of Afrofuturist elements in Ishmael Reed's fiction, see Alondra Nelson's introduction to the Social Text special issue on Afrofuturism (2002) and Roxanne Harde's ‘ “We will make our own Future Text”: allegory, iconoclasm, and reverence in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo’ (2003). For a similar discussion of Amiri Baraka, see Paul Youngquist's ‘The space machine: Baraka and science fiction.’ For explorations of Afrofuturism in science fiction, see Mark Dery's ‘Black to the future: interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’ (1993); Gregory Rutledge's ‘Black futurist fiction and fantasy: The racial establishment’ (2001) and ‘Science fiction and the black power/arts movement: The transpositional cosmogony of Samuel R. Delany Jr.’ (2002); and Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating's ‘ “Radio Imagination”: Octavia Butler on the Poetics of Narrative Embodiment’ (2001). Reed, Baraka, Delany and Butler are also featured prominently on Alonda Nelson and Paul D. Miller's Afrofuturism website.

Afrofuturist scholars including Alondra Nelson, Mark Dery and Sheree R. Thomas all acknowledge Ellison's place in early Afrofuturist history. To date, however, I have found only one other sustained exploration of this subject: Alexander G. Weheliye's ‘ “I am I be”: the subject of Sonic Afro-modernity’ (2003).

At the time of writing there is only one book-length critical study, three literary anthologies and one website devoted to Afrofuturism. For further reading on this subject, see, respectively, Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fictions (1999); Sheree R. Thomas' Dark Matters: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000), and Dark Matters: Reading the Bones (2004); Nalo Hopkinson's Whispers From the Cotton Tree: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000); and Alondra Nelson's Afrofuturism.net (2000).

For further discussion of black technosubjects in science fiction, see Lisa Yaszek, The Self Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative (2002). See also Jeboon Ye's ‘The representation of inappropriate/d others: the epistemology of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series’ (2004), and Rebecca Holden's ‘The high costs of cyborg survival: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy’ (1998). For a related discussion of Afrodiasporic engagements with (and appropriations of) cybernetic sciences and technologies, see Ron Eglash's ‘African influences in cybernetics’ (1995). For in-depth exploration of black technosubjects in the popular music industry, see Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fictions (1999).

The invisible man's underground sojourn is indeed a long one. According to Patrick W. Shaw, the chronology of the novel indicates that he stays in his basement from 1931 – 1948, or seventeen years (1990, p. 119).

Indeed, Afrofuturist scholars including Kodwo Eshun and Alexander G. Weheliye regularly cite this passage from Ellison in their assessments of sonic Afrofuturism. As Weheliye notes, there has been a great deal of critical discussion regarding Ellison's use of jazz and the blues in his novel, but until the advent of Afrofuturist scholarship most of this discussion glossed over the technological aspects of black popular music. As such, they miss a key element of Ellison's thinking about technologically mediated subjectivity (Weheliye 2003, p. 100). For further discussion of sonic Afrofuturism as it pertains to Ellison see Eshun's ‘Further considerations on Afrofuturism’ (2003) and Weheliye's ‘ “I am I be”: the subject of sonic Afro-modernity’ (2003). For two recent but more conventional treatments of music in Ellison, A. see Timothy Spaulding's ‘Embracing chaos in narrative form: the bebop aesthetic in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man’ (2004), and Wilfred Raussert's ‘Jazz, time, and narrativity’ (2000).