‘You see,’ he said turning to Mr. Norton, ‘he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It’s worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is – well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie!’
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
R. Ellison, Invisible Man, New York, 1952, p. 94.
A. Nadal, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon, Iowa City, 1991.
G. Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New Brunswick, NJ, 1996 [1944]; B. T. Washington, Up from Slavery, ed. W. L. Andrews, New York, 1996 [1901].
H. L. Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Oxford, 1989. See also H. L. Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Sign, Oxford, 1989, pp. 245–6, where an extended passage on Ellison’s Signification on Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy – e.g., ‘invisible man’ for Wright’s ‘black boy’ – well demonstrates the power of absence, that is, the lack of direct reference or citation perhaps makes the case even more strongly.
Gates, Signifying Monkey (n. 4 above), p. 120.
K. A. Appiah, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, Cambridge, MA, 2014.
A student perusing the internet would find the following on ‘humanism’, which leaves classical contributions out of the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism. Helpful for a genealogy of classical humanities within the United States is C. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
P. Rankine, ‘The Body and Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison’s Novel in Twenty-First-Century Performance and Public Spaces’, in The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, ed. M. C. Conner and L. E. Morel, Jackson, MS, 2016, pp. 55–74.
S. Adell, Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature, Urbana, IL, 1994.
For an extended study of the symbol of the white line, see G. Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley, Cambridge, 1999.
For one study of this influence, see P. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature, Madison, WI, 2006.
B. T. Washington, ‘The Awakening of the Negro’, Atlantic Monthly, 78, 1896, pp. 322–8. Washington repeats the anecdote in 1901 in his autobiography, Up From Slavery; see Hanses's essay in this collection.
M. V. Ronnick, The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship, Detroit, 2005.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. H. L. Gates Jr. and T. H. Oliver, New York, 1999, pp. 73–4.
On Du Bois and German humanism, see Adell, Double-Consciousness/Double Bind (n. 9 above) and Appiah, Lines of Descent (n. 6 above).
In the Ellisonian passage alone, ‘understand’ is repeated three times. The word has 95 other occurrences throughout the novel.
Appiah, Lines of Descent (n. 6 above), p. 78.
Compare D. Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Dance, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927, New York, 2002.
On nominalist and ontological approaches to race, and norms of identification, see Appiah, Lines of Descent (n. 6 above), pp. 147–61; on race and performance, see H. Young, Embodying Black Experience, Ann Arbor, MI, 2010.
C. West, The Cornel West Reader, New York, 2000, p. 70.
Appiah, Lines of Descent (n. 6 above), p. 140, paraphrasing Du Bois’s ‘Conservation of Races’ (1897), discussed further in Lee's contribution to this volume.
Du Bois, The Negro, New York, 1915, p. 6.
See, e.g., Appiah, Lines of Descent (n. 6 above), p. 84: ‘The French count Arthur de Gobineau posited just … three races in his Essay on the Inequality of Races (1853–1855), arguing for polygenesis, the view that they did not even share a common ancestor; the distinguished Darwinian Ernst Haeckel, a Prussian anatomist, argued in 1878 that there were twelve; the German-born naturalist Carl Vogt … mentions Egyptians, Jews, Tatars, Scythians, the races of Assyria and India, Negroes, Berbers, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, and Turks in a single paragraph of his Lectures on Man.’
Du Bois, The Negro (n. 22 above), p. 9.
See, e.g., Houston A. Baker and K. Merinda Simmons, eds., The Trouble with Post-Blackness, New York, 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rankine, P. Afterlife: Du Bois, Classical Humanism and the Matter of Black Lives. Int class trad 26, 86–96 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0481-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0481-y