Beyond Martyrdom: Rereading Invisible Man

• Published date: 01 April 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231196831
• Author: Ferris Lupino
• Date: 01 April 2024

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231196831

Political Theory

2024, Vol. 52(2) 236 –258

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231196831

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Article

Beyond Martyrdom:

Rereading Invisible Man

Ferris Lupino1

Abstract

For political and literary theorists working on race, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man is a canonical text. Most political theorists approach the novel through

what this essay calls a “martyr reading,” though martyrdom is just one of

several political strategies explored in the work. This essay highlights an

alternative in Ellison’s repertoire. The “trickster reading” developed here

better accounts for several key scenes in the novel and also shows the limits

of martyrdom as a technique of democratic politics. While other democratic

theorists have identified Ellison with redemptive or deliberative aims, the

novel’s references to Homer’s Odyssey, with its own trickster-hero, license

a trickster reading of Invisible Man. Tricksters do not take on suffering, loss,

or sacrifice in the hope of redemption nor are they necessarily committed

to the virtues of deliberation. Instead, they evade sacrifice by resorting

routinely to irony, cunning, and refusal. This reading demonstrates the

importance of these techniques to Ellison’s vision and to our politics today.

Keywords

democratic theory, Black political thought, Ralph Ellison, sacrifice, martyrdom,

trickster

“. . . I now recognized my invisibility. So I’d accept it, I’d explore it, rine and

heart. I’d plunge into it with both feet and they’d gag.”

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ferris Lupino, Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Jesse Hall,

Room 409D, 801 Conley Ave. Columbia, MO 65211, USA.

Email: falgk6@missouri.edu

1196831PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231196831Political TheoryLupino

research-article2023

Lupino 237

Introduction

For political theorists thinking about race in the United States, Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man is a canonical text. The novel tells the story of a young Black

man who is subjected to a variety of racist insults and injuries as he moves

from the American South up to New York and attempts to make a living. With

each successive episode, the initially naïve narrator becomes increasingly

aware of how race and racism operate, and he describes these forces as ren-

dering him invisible. Many thinkers have elaborated on Ellison’s metaphor of

invisibility to diagnose racial oppression. West (2000), for instance, finds

white supremacy is constituted by invisibility because it “makes it difficult

for communication to take place owing to the various myths and distortions,

stereotypes that evolve around each group” (41). Similarly, Mills (1997)

draws on Ellison to describe the epistemology of white ignorance in the racial

contract, and Gordon (2000) describes the struggle for appearance (against

invisibility) as a key component of Black existentialism.

More recently, a wave of scholarship takes the novel as useful not only for

describing the nature of oppression, but also as offering a response to it.

These scholars employ what I call a “martyr reading” of the novel. The

martyr reading centers on sacrifice, which is an important concept for Ellison.

In his critical essays and interviews, he routinely frames American race

rituals—from stereotyping to racist violence—as scapegoating or sacrificial

acts, whose expiatory function benefits whites.1 It is difficult to call Ellison’s

views of sacrifice hopeful, but some commentators, including Allen (2004,

2021), Booth (2008), Danoff (2019), Eddy (2003), and Turner (2012), draw a

hopeful lesson from these writings—they redeem sacrifice by situating it in

a process of democratic aspiration, in which the risk of sacrifice moves

witnesses (ideally) to greater empathy and action. W. James Booth reads the

1. One example is Ellison’s ([1964] 1995c) claim that Hemingway was drawn

to the ritualized violence of the Spanish bullfight instead of “that ritual of

violence closer to home, that ritual in which the sacrifice is that of a human

scapegoat, the lynching bee” (“Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask

of Humanity,” (37). Another scapegoating ritual noted by Ellison is stereo-

typing. Describing blackface performance in “Change the Joke and Slip the

Yoke,” Ellison ([1964] 1995c) observes that, “the specific rhetorical situation

involves the self-humiliation of the ‘sacrificial’ figure, and that a psychological

dissociation from this symbolic self-maiming is one of the powerful motives at

work in the audience” (49).