Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison's Invisible Man

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novel around the narrator's encounters with white women and around sex ualized encounters with white men. Furthermore, because Ellison estab lishes his interrogation of power within the concept of (in)visibility, a full analysis of intersections in the novel must consider the politics of sight both in the text and in the culture that produced it. The as disempowerment argument overlooks the fact that matrices of power are rooted in the visibility of bodies rather than in the erasure of agency that implies. Ellison's novel appears at a key moment in the racial history of the US, as a crossover music industry fused with the emergence of television. This fusion created a context in which visibility was possible for black bodies only when they performed the role of other for white culture. Even more often, seeing race acted merely as a conduit for white culture's appropriation and commodification of black cultural forms. This moment, most frequently symbolized by Elvis Presley mdAmos 'n 'Andy, illustrates how psychosocial and economic forces inflect the visual signi fier we call race. Ellison advocates invisibility as a powerful cultural space, a space from which the interrelated matrices of dominance and, in fact, the concept of the body are deconstructed.