"A Complex Double Vision": The Motives Behind the Masks in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

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 A...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Text and performance quarterly 2001-07, Vol.21 (3), p.145-182
Main Author: Suchy, Patricia A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bakhtin
blackface performance
Invisible Man
masking
Ralph Ellison
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1046-2937
1479-5760
DOI:10.1080/10462930108616168