"Regarde le ngre!": Race, (In)Visibility and Subjecthood in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English (UK)

Sarah Jilani

关键词: Psychoanalysis;    Race;    Ralph Ellison;    Toni Morrison;    Subjectivity;    Jacques Lacan;   

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of Durham

【 摘 要 】

This essay investigates the functionings of "Whiteness" as the master signifier in a "regime of visibility" that creates raced subjects only to then deny them their subjecthood in both the individual and collective unconscious. Examining where race is located within Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, how it is signified and made (in)visible, and questioning its mechanisms in granting or denying subjecthood, requires an interrogation of its system of signification: a system here framed with the aid of Fanonian and Lacanian thought. These two novels crucially question how seeing oneself as "lacking in Whiteness" is a desubjectifying psychic and social experience, and what role (in)visibility has in both securing that desubjectified status, and in the reclaiming of subjecthood for the raced self.

【 授权许可】

CC BY