The Politics of Black Leadership and Identity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) has gotten critics' rave and blame at the same time. On the one hand, it is highly rated as a great novel which accomplishes the aesthetics of a novel dealing with a universal theme of human alienation. On the other hand, it is strongly criticized for the lack of politics by black nationalist and leftist critics. In fact, Invisible Man, accomplishing the aesthetics of a novel, takes clear racial politics in representing black leadership and exploring the protagonist's identity. First, Invisible Man is political in exploring ideal black leadership through the critiques of three kinds of misleadership and the protagonist's pursuit of being a black leader. The protagonist who aspired to be a Booker T. Washington, after experiencing failure to become a Harlem leader and finding his invisibility, realizes that ideal black leadership should be based on 'the black people,' not elitism, idealism or particular ideology. Second, the protagonist's search for identity as an African American is also political in that blacks haven't been considered 'Americans' by whites throughout the history. Dealing with this issue, Ellison acutely criticizes the whites who have driven blacks to the state of invisibility, associating them with historical white leaders. This means that blacks' invisibility doesn't come from some evil individual whites but from the corrupt white power that destroys the ideal “principle” of America. Through this study, we can say that Invisible Man, contrary to black nationalist and leftist critics' negative views on the lack of politics, has fulfilled two goals of aesthetics and politics as a literary work.