Triangulating black unemployment, anti-black police violence and the spread of riots in moments of financial crisis, this essay reads Ralph Ellison’s visionary 1952 novel Invisible Man in relation to what Giovanni Arrighi identifies as the US systemic cycle of accumulation. In his structuralist account of developments in the capitalist world-system, Arrighi adopts Fernand Braudel’s model of the longue duree, with its seasonal logic of hegemonic transition whereby autumn for one declining global hegemon means spring for the next. 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 cycle reaches its own crisis of accumulation in the late 1960s, and the long American century enters its autumnal downturn, the expulsion of labour from the site of production will sound the death knell for African American Bildung. Anticipating the coming of autumn in terms of exhaustion and abjection, Invisible Man envisions the end of American economic hegemony as a crushing experience of social death. Tracing the relationship between precarity and the American novel across this transitional period, the present essay revisits Ellison’s literary milestone to chart the decline of the American century from within its zenith.

中文翻译：

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黑化：拉尔夫·埃里森的隐形人与反黑的历史

这篇文章对黑人失业、反黑人警察暴力和金融危机时刻的骚乱蔓延进行了三角分析，将拉尔夫·埃里森 (Ralph Ellison) 1952 年富有远见的小说《隐形人》(Invisible Man) 与乔瓦尼·阿瑞吉 (Giovanni Arrighi) 认为的美国系统性积累循环相关联。在他对资本主义世界体系发展的结构主义描述中，阿瑞吉采用了费尔南德·布罗代尔的长效模式，其霸权转变的季节性逻辑，即一个衰落的全球霸权的秋天意味着下一个全球霸权的春天。对于埃里森的未透露姓名的叙述者来说，他争取知名度的斗争与美国经济增长的兴衰有先见之明，春天也带有“死亡的恶臭”。当美国周期在 1960 年代后期达到自身的积累危机，漫长的美国世纪进入秋季低迷期时，将劳工驱逐出生产地点将为非裔美国人的成长敲响丧钟。Invisible Man 以精疲力竭和落魄的方式预测秋天的到来，将美国经济霸权的终结视为社会死亡的毁灭性体验。这篇文章追溯了这个过渡时期的不稳定与美国小说之间的关系，重新审视了埃里森的文学里程碑，从其巅峰时期描绘了美国世纪的衰落。