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  • Blacking OutRalph Ellison's Invisible Man and the Historicity of Antiblackness
  • Sean O'Brien (bio)

There's a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell either of death or of spring—I hope spring. But don't let me trick you, there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me. And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stenches of death.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Since the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. labor markets have crept sluggishly toward recovery. Official unemployment rates have fallen from 10 percent in 2009 to 3.6 percent as of May 2019, even as real wages have stagnated and productivity growth has been negligible. Black unemployment rates, however, have remained high—at a nearhistoric low of 6.1 percent, they are nearly twice the national average—while the discrepancy between black and nonblack unemployment, regardless of educational background, has hardly budged in fifty years.1 This figure skyrockets and the racial gap becomes a chasm when it is adjusted to account for black underemployment and incarceration rates, both of which began to climb with deindustrialization and spiked following the crash in 2008. African Americans swell the ranks of a bloated and precarious service sector, while the rate of imprisonment for black men has increased by more than 500 percent over the past four decades, giving the lie to claims that black precarity has simply become more visible in recent years through the proliferation of new media.2 Meanwhile, in the post-2008 period, antiblack police violence once again took center stage in America: in 2015, black Americans were nine times as likely as nonblack Americans to be killed by police.3 Under generalized conditions of rising precarity—and in [End Page 80] response to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland—a wave of riots swept the United States. This triangulation of black unemployment, antiblack police violence, and the spread of riots in moments of financial crisis suggests that racialization—the set of ascriptive processes that produces race as a sociological category and naturalizes dispossession along lines of phenotypical difference—mediates the unfolding relationship between cycles of accumulation and cycles of struggle.

Turning to the early postwar period to historicize the entangled forms of racialized precarity and proletarian self-activity that characterize the present, this essay reads Ralph Ellison's visionary 1952 novel Invisible Man in relation to what Giovanni Arrighi identifies as the U.S. systemic cycle of accumulation. For Arrighi, the economic shift in the second half of the twentieth century from industry to finance signals a crisis in American hegemony—the latest in a series of systemic cycles of accumulation, each with its geopolitical center—wherein capital, having exhausted the profitability of manufacture, abandons commodity production and leaps into liquidity.4 In his structuralist account of late-twentieth-century 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 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" (580). When the United States 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 labor 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 expansion as a crushing experience of social death. In what follows, I trace the relationship between racialized precarity and the African American novel across this transitional period, revisiting Ellison's literary milestone to chart the decline of the American century from within its zenith.

Invisible Man stages a series of expulsions from conventional sites of entrance into twentieth-century American civil society. Living in exile beneath the street, the nameless narrator recounts how he was expelled...

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