Abstract
This study examines the metaphysical aspects of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Most scholars discuss race, but my divergence is predicated in the Eastern (Indian/Odisha), Buddhist (Mandarin), Kemetic (African), Greek (Aristotle), and French (Sartre) influences Ellison weaves into the narrative. As is known, some founding theorists of the foundations of western philosophy often used an inverted version of Buddhist philosophy to articulate their ideas about law, being, time, and space. These seemingly primitive sites of spiritual and philosophical matters such as Dogen’s Shobogenzo of the 13th century were repositories of ancient wisdom for Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, to name a few. Also, some theories seemingly immaterial to the genre of African-American literature are considered risky. However, approaching abjection, existential wanderings, meta-legality, and dark matter consciousness forged by law and empire bring the text into a modern mode of examining the exiling nature of blackness and defragmentation of the Black mind from an African World view (Kemetic). I delve into varying spaces of the underground and “heavenly” realms of thought enacted by Ellison’s narrator’s ascent and descent through the white mist (Black erasure trope), through women, and his performative method for accessing Dionne Brand’s concept of the Door of No Return; a space in the physical gulf (transnationalism/transatlantic wanderings), Ouidah (the Gate of No Return), and the (im)material mind where matter and spirituality combine in matrixial realms of (sub)consciousness. How may the mind enact aversion to imperialism through text and performative resistance? I think alongside Fred Moten, Sarah Cervenak, and Christina Sharpe.
Presenters
Ikea JohnsonAssistant Professor, English, Communications and Media, Salve Regina University, Rhode Island, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Existential, Wandering, Spirituality, Modern Literature, Meta-legality, Being/Non-Being
