Toward Counternarratives of Critical Thinking and Writing

Abstract

This next year is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, an occasion that has prompted us, as editors, to reread the novel as a text very much about writing pedagogy and history. Editing is, of course, a pedagogical process in guiding a manuscript through revisions to the endpoint of publication, which inscribes the text in history while conferring upon its author the cultural capital that facilitates future publications. Because history in this way shapes and is shaped by textual production, we take this moment to commemorate the publication of Ellison’s novel by reflecting on the power we hold as editors and considering what we might learn from Invisible Man about our own editorial praxis. The novel depicts a power structure that has created a master narrative through what Slevin (2001) would call a “teleology of improvement,” in which students are defined as lacking the discourse that will award them the cultural capital necessary for upward mobility in “the spiral of history” (Ellison, 1972, p. 6). Students “improve” by suppressing their home discourses as they learn how to reproduce a dominant one. The result is a symbolic violence, which the novel’s unnamed narrator eventually discovers. Having excelled as a writer and speaker by repeating the dominant discourse learned in school and college and through social activism, he finds that his efforts have only perpetuated a power structure that denies him racial equality and that his upward mobility has really been an endless cycle of manipulation: “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy” (p. 6). This symbolic violence renders the narrator invisible. Repeatedly knocked downward and backward in the spiral, he comes to identify with the “I” of the song “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?” In the title’s reference to bruising as the effect of physical punishment, the colors black and blue mark the skin as universal, as a synecdoche for humankind. But when the “I” is embodied by Louis Armstrong through his performance of the song, “black” is reassigned to the color of skin itself, as a synecdoche for a particular race, and the physical effect of punishment becomes symbolic: being black and downcast is punishment the narrator will inevitably suffer, regardless of what he does or does not do. However, the “I” also exists, therefore, prior to race, which is a “construction of their inner eyes” (p. 3), making him invisible to the power structure. Living apart from the spiral of history, he steals electricity from Monopolated Light & Power to play on a phonograph “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?” Between the song’s notations, its inscription in history, he explores space and time: