Invisible Man: A Parable for Our Times?

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Four notable black artists explore Ralph Ellison's impassioned first novel Invisible Man.

Ralph Ellison's impassioned first novel Invisible Man, is about being black in 1930s America. 70 years after its publication, what can it say about the black experience today?

April 2022 marks the 70th anniversary of Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel, Invisible Man, which tells the extraordinary story of a man who is invisible “simply because people refuse to see me”. The invisibility of Ellison’s protagonist - a black man caught in the discord of 20th century racism - is, above all, about what it means to be black. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, the idea of invisibility for young black men, and women, exists perhaps not merely as a metaphor, but has become a matter of necessity. Seventy years on, how does Ellison's story speak about the black experience today? Four notable black artists define, or redefine, what his novel can say now about being a black body in the public space.

Producer: Cecile Wright 
Contributors: Adjoa Andoh, Jacob Sam La Rose, Rommi Smith, Tyler Mitchell 
Novel Extracts read by Chris Jack

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