![]() For Ellison, Myrdal and the novel's Communist Brotherhood share a perspective limited by a “scientific” distance from, and instrumental treatment of, African Americans. The novel repeatedly stages the ethical and ontological dilemma in which viewers are momentarily uncertain whether they are looking at a person or an automaton, which the essay links with Ellison's numerous discussions of African American political views as “reactions” rather than actions in their own right. This scientism, which characterizes both the sociological construction of the so-called “Negro problem” and Ellison's representation of a scientifically oriented Communist Party, takes on its literary expression through Ellison's satirical use of the automaton. Through Ellison's other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with Ellison's and others' resistance to a midcentury ideology of scientism. ![]() This essay considers Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Tracing the relationship between precarity and the African American novel across this transitional period, this essay revisits Ellison’s literary milestone to chart the decline of the American century from within its zenith. Anticipating the coming of autumn in terms of exhaustion and abjection, Invisible Man envisions the end of American economic expansion as a crushing experience of social death. For Ellison’s unnamed narrator, whose struggle for visibility is presciently tied to the rise and fall of American growth, spring too carries its “stenches of death.” When the US faces its own crisis of accumulation in the late 1960s and the long American century enters its autumnal downturn in the early 1970s, the expulsion of labour from the site of production will sound the death knell for African American Bildung. In his structuralist account of developments in the capitalist world-system, Arrighi adopts Fernand Braudel’s model of the longue durée, with its seasonal logic of hegemonic transition whereby autumn for one declining global hegemon means spring for the next. ![]() Triangulating black unemployment, antiblack police violence and the spread of riots in moments of financial crisis, this essay read Ralph Ellison’s visionary 1952 novel Invisible Man in relation to what Giovanni Arrighi identifies as the US systemic cycle of accumulation. ![]()
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