scholarly journals Perception, visibility and invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-35
Author(s):  
Beugre Zouankouan Stéphane
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
White People ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
White American ◽  
People’S Perception ◽  
Insightful Analysis ◽  
American Society

This study analyses three essential motifs which are perception, visibility and invisibility and how their relationships determine and legislate the interracial relationships between whites and blacks in Ralph Ellison’s novel, INVISIBLE MAN. Through insightful analysis, this paper aims to show how from a visible status in existence, the perception that white people have about black people transforms this visibility into an invisible status both in human existence and society and namely in the white American society. And also it aims to clear out how this metamorphosis of black people from visibility to invisibility at first based on white people's perception, is principally based and due to their color of skin, and to another “Blackness” of Black people or African-Americans color of skin. Creating a real problem of existence and identity for black people through the question: “do I exist?”, the refusal of such perception and invisibility constructed by racism, stereotypes, prejudices and the concept of white people superiority will oblige black people to struggle for their visibility, their true existence, their identity and recognition by white people as an equal human being.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
Trial Court ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Black plaintiffs in civil suits remain a little known aspect of the legal history of the slave South. African Americans were not only observers of trials, informal participants, defendants, or objects of regulation: trial court records reveal them to be prolific litigators as well. They were parties to civil suits in their own interests and directly active in legal proceedings. They sued other black people, certainly, but they also sued white people. What is more, they often won. This is a phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by historians. But it ought not to be, because it speaks to the heart of the ways we understand the operation of power, of law, and of racial hierarchies in the slave South. The black legal experience in America cannot be reduced to white regulation and black criminality. Examining African Americans’ involvement in private law reveals a different picture. Black people appealed to the courts to protect their interests. They exploited the language of rights and property, thus including themselves within an American narrative of citizenship and privilege in advance of formal emancipation. When black litigants made such claims at law, they expected the courts to validate and execute those claims. Indeed, they sought accountability. Thus, seemingly mundane civil actions like debt recovery suits complicate our notions about the sources of rights and their relationship to civic inclusion.

Predatory Inclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-262
Author(s):  
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Black People ◽  
Home Ownership ◽  
Rental Market ◽  
American Society ◽  
The U.S

Homeownership in the U.S. is often touted as a means to escape poverty, build wealth, and fully participate in American society. However, racism in the broader American society ultimately resulted in a racist housing market that excludes Black people from homeownership and depresses the value of property inhabited by African Americans. The perception that Black buyers are risky has continued to fuel predatory practices in real estate. The author notes that African Americans should not be limited to the rental market because of inequality in the housing market. Instead, she suggests people should question American society, a society in which full citizenship is reliant upon home ownership.

scholarly journals Introduction: African Americans: Official and Unofficial Violence in America

2020 ◽  
pp. 002193472097008
Author(s):  
Molefi Kete Asante
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Active Imagination ◽  
White People ◽  
Control Forces

In this essay the author introduces the emergence of the paddy rollers as control forces to contain the black population during the enslavement of Africans in the United States. Soon after the end of the Civil War the police forces took over the activities that had been the purvey of the paddy rollers: keeping black people in place and out of the way of white people. However, the resistance to abuse, torture, and murder was never far from the active imagination and reality of African Americans who maintained their own humanity. Tracing, in a limited fashion, how the biologically unscientific race became the premise for racism and the attacks on black people by police officers who often took their perceptions of blacks, especially black men, as negative and inferior from the systemic and institutional character of the society’s understanding of superior and inferior humans. This, according to the author, is at the base of hatred, discrimination, and lynching of African Americans in current and previous occasions. He illustrates this by discussing the case of Mary Turner who was killed in the early part of the 20th century for objecting to white mob attacks on her husband.

scholarly journals The Blue Eyes vs Untrue Ideas: A Postcolonial Critique of Pecola’s Persistence to Fit in the White American Society in The Bluest Eye

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
A.K.M. Aminur Rashid
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
White American ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
The North ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
American Society ◽  
Blue Eyes

Set in Ohio, the north side of America, the tone in The Bluest Eye features post-colonial treatment to its central character, Pecola Breedlove. This paper discusses how she experiences a sense of being completely ruined after she is raped by her father, and her quest for the blue eyes meets merely untrue ideas. The plot, as described in the paper, provides a post-colonial background of two racial conflicts regarding the blackness, and the white beauty in America. This paper critically draws on the idea of physical whiteness as being the only American standard of beauty while Pecola’s physical ugliness draws on how black people get seriously marginalized for their blackness of their own bodies. The storyline progresses to show how Pecola‟s tragedy becomes the central theme regarding the issue of seeing, and of being seen. The paper presents a binary opposite through the portrayal of black Pecola on one side, and Mary Janes, or Shirley Temple on the other. Consequently, the conflicts meet hardly any positive solution. Pecola receives exactly the behavior that the black slaves were used to receive from the whites in the past. From the historical perspective, The United States experienced inequality between the whites, and the blacks at that time when Morrison wrote this novel. She saw that the black race got segregated from the whites in the case of superiority. Racial tension also influenced the children in the schools, where the black ones were ridiculed there. However, the acceptance of the fair skin, actually, tormented black people both psychologically, and left a scar on them like Pecola Breedlove experiences.

Enlisting and Excluding an “Enemy Race”

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-98
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
White People ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Military

Chapter 2 examines the US military’s effort to restrict Japanese Americans’ access to the nation’s fighting forces during World War II. In the navy, Japanese Americans were barred from enlisting and serving throughout the war. But the army’s restrictive policies, by contrast, changed dramatically and repeatedly over the course of the war, resulting in Japanese Americans zigging and zagging between exclusion and inclusion. At times their army access approximated that for white people; other times it was more restricted than that for black people. In the end, like African Americans, Japanese Americans were underrepresented in the military. At the same time, their enlistment barriers had their own particularities, which bespoke the variety of racisms in wartime America and its military, as well as the variety of struggles that emerged to uproot them.

scholarly journals RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (12SE) ◽  
pp. 29-35
Author(s):  
T. Deivasigamani
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Black People ◽  
American People ◽  
White People ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
American Society ◽  
Story Writer

Jamaica Kincaid is an American novelist, short-story writer, gardener, essayist, and reviewer. She has become one of Caribbean’s major woman writers in recent decades. Kincaid’s writings comprise exile, search for identity, and alienation. Her production strikes the reader with a balanced mixture of anger and loss. Kincaid’s great variety of issues draws so many readers to her writings.  Kincaid’s novels reflect her desire to draw on the people, places, language, race, mother-daughter relationship, values, cultural traditions, and politics that have shaped her own life and that of African American people. In America, Racial discrimination is very common and hurts very much. During the slavery era, white people had black people as slaves in their own household. Black people have to satisfy their white masters. If the white people were not satisfied, they would try to hurt the black people. This paper “Racial Discrimination in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother” focuses on how race plays a pivotal role in Africans literature and their day today life and how blacks suffered for their survival.  It also reveals how Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother illuminates black American experiences in the contemporary American society from various perspectives. It also shows how black women have been exploited in a white dominated male chauvinistic society. In the face of enormous problems and frequent victimization, black women are shown imitating through their sense of community and social powers.

scholarly journals Black’s Survival Strategy: Tricksterism in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Meiling Fu
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Survival Strategy ◽  
White People ◽  
Invisible Man

This paper is intended to investigate tricksterism in Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man. Through analyzing the successful tricksters and the unsuccessful tricksters, this research concludes that tricksterism is a survival strategy in the society of white supremacy, and black people have to wear the mask and trick the white people for the cause of eliminating racial discrimination.Keywords: tricksterism; Invisible Man; survival strategy; equality 

scholarly journals THE NARRATOR’S VOICE OF FREEDOM IN RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN: A STUDY OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Khotimatul Khusnah ◽  
Vita Vendityaningtyas
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Black People ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
White People ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Mental Disturbance ◽  
The Voice

<p>The purpose of this research is to<strong> </strong>describe<strong> </strong>the position of Black people as the folk who get discrimination in America and explain the Narrator’s voice as the Black people in conveying the equality between Black and White people in America that is represented in<em> Invisible Man</em> novel. This research uses qualitative research. The researcher needs postcolonial literature by Lois Tyson to get evidences the effects and goals of the author in creating a story. The analysis reveals that Black people include subordinate people, oppressed minority group, and lower class that always suppressed and exploited by superior people who have power. Black people try to fight against superior to show their feeling of freedom for getting the same position and equality as White by conveying their voice through protest. The conclusion shows that inferiority makes Black people who have lower position in society get oppression that cause physical and mental disturbance from superior and the Narrator tries to struggle and get confession of Black people from the domination of White in order to survive their existence in society by conveying the voice with non-violence way through speech, action and music.</p>

African Americans and the Crisis of Modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-60
Author(s):  
Eric S. King
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity

This article examines Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun by exploring the conflict between a traditionally Southern, Afro-Christian, communitarian worldview and certain more destabilizing elements of the worldview of modernity. In addition to examining the socio-economic problems confronted by some African Americans in the play, this article investigates the worldviews by which these Black people frame their problems as well as the dynamics within the relationships of a Black family that lives at the intersection of racial, class, and gender inequality in Chicago during the latter 1950s.

Free but fragile: Human relations amidst poverty and HIV in democratic South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Christina Landman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black People ◽  
Hiv Treatment ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Black Township

Dullstroom-Emnotweni is the highest town in South Africa. Cold and misty, it is situated in the eastern Highveld, halfway between the capital Pretoria/Tswane and the Mozambique border. Alongside the main road of the white town, 27 restaurants provide entertainment to tourists on their way to Mozambique or the Kruger National Park. The inhabitants of the black township, Sakhelwe, are remnants of the Southern Ndebele who have lost their land a century ago in wars against the whites. They are mainly dependent on employment as cleaners and waitresses in the still predominantly white town. Three white people from the white town and three black people from the township have been interviewed on their views whether democracy has brought changes to this society during the past 20 years. Answers cover a wide range of views. Gratitude is expressed that women are now safer and HIV treatment available. However, unemployment and poverty persist in a community that nevertheless shows resilience and feeds on hope. While the first part of this article relates the interviews, the final part identifies from them the discourses that keep the black and white communities from forming a group identity that is based on equality and human dignity as the values of democracy.

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