Introduction

Abstract

Abstract I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-:and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.... That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man THE invisibility Ralph Ellison so eloquently denounces has tragically influenced the ways many scholars have interpreted the history of antebellum black America. Historians have in many cases been able to see blacks only as they wished to see them-only as servile, lazy, and happy, or only as defiant, discontented, and rebellious. The invisibility may, however, be the result of something more pernicious and less obvious than ideological or racial biases. It may be not merely “a matter of the construction of their inner eyes” but also a matter of methodology.