Invisibility and the Commodification of Blackness in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Percival Everett’s Erasure

Abstract

"This essay specifically examines Erasure as a postmodern rewriting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and as a revision of the modernist trope of Black invisibility so famously rendered by Ellison. Drawing upon poststructuralist theories of “race” as well as New Black Aesthetics theories of cultural hybridity, I contend that Erasure highlights modes of “invisibility” that persevere in contemporary American literary and consumer cultures. Unlike modernist invisibility that manifested itself in the fissures between Black and white in the biracial social taxonomy of the United States throughout most of the twentieth century, contemporary generic and aesthetic categories generate sublimated forms of invisibility that give the appearance of legitimizing heterogeneous African American subjects while simultaneously and subversively regulating the available range of supposedly “authentic” Black representations. In this process, the rich pluralism of Black culture and aesthetics gets reduced to a few subgenres that prove most economically viable and palatable to white and Black consumers alike."