“A complex double vision”: The motives behind the masks in Ralph Ellison’s invisible man
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2001
Abstract
This essay describes the process of staging Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and analyzes the acts of masking and spectatorship in three key scenes of the adaptation. The novel itself “stages” certain oral performance forms in order to interrogate them as sites of the performativity of American racial politics. Adapted for the stage, Invisible Man affords the opportunity for “showing the masking” of a complexly metaperformative double vision. This vision encompasses what Ellison calls the ambiguous “motives hidden behind the mask” of blackface minstrelsy, which grew in complexity in this adaptation due to the fact that most of its performers were white. The production quoted the conventions of minstrelsy in order to expose their motives, but this act of quotation became double-voiced by virtue of the production’s varying motives for re-appropriating the blackface mask. © 2001 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
Text and Performance Quarterly
First Page
145
Last Page
182
Recommended Citation
Suchy, P. (2001). “A complex double vision”: The motives behind the masks in Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. Text and Performance Quarterly, 21 (3), 145-182. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930108616168