Black Skin, Red Masks: Racism, Communism and the Quest of Subjectivity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Bakhtiar, S. 2019. Black Skin, Red Masks: Racism, Communism and the Quest of Subjectivity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research. 6 (1), pp. 6-14. https://doi.org/10.26417/ejser.v6i1.p6-14

TitleBlack Skin, Red Masks: Racism, Communism and the Quest of Subjectivity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
TypeJournal article
AuthorsBakhtiar, S.
Abstract

This essay aims at proposing a study of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952), where the author focuses on the difficult journey of black intellectuals in quest for a strong black identity in postwar America. The theoretical reflection in this paper is based, in a first phase, on the philosophical and political perspectives of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, whose works and debates have articulated an important source to understand the quest of subjectivity and intellectual consciousness in the 1950s, a period marked not only by the emergence of civil rights movement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also the progressive replacement of Communism by alternative emancipatory currents such as existentialism, postcolonialism and (post-) structuralism. From this discussion, the essay indicates, how (post-) Marxist thinkers, like Etienne Balibar, investigate the limits of the a priori paradigms promoted by the traditional humanistic (natural law-positive law) and communist narratives (alienation-emancipation), which lack conceptual and historical efficacy when it comes to understand and respond to new (bio-capitalist) forms of discrimination, which constantly evolve according to the epoch and the place.

KeywordsAmerican Fiction
Ralph Ellison
Racism
Marxism
JournalEuropean Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research
Journal citation6 (1), pp. 6-14
ISSN2411-9563
2312-8429
Year2019
PublisherEuropean Journal of Social Science Education and Research
Publisher's version
License
CC BY-SA 4.0
File Access Level
Open (open metadata and files)
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.26417/ejser.v6i1.p6-14
Publication dates
Published30 Apr 2019

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