It is true that during the 1970s heyday of Black Power and Black Arts, Ellison’s embrace of a Western cultural lineage for his art placed him at odds with many vocal partisans of the Black Aesthetic. Old news, though, is hardly the phrase one associates with Invisible Man these days.

But the decision itself, which would declare unconstitutional the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, was still a couple of years off. In the years that Ellison wrote his novel, the political and social agitation and decisions in lower court cases that would lead to the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v Board of Education had already signalled that a major social change might be imminent. Although the rigour with which the dictates of this regime were enforced varied from time to time and place to place, the society in which Ellison came of age was one where openly discriminatory actions and policies had the sanction of both law and custom.

When Ellison’s novel, which chronicled the erratic journey of its unnamed protagonist from the segregated American South to New York City’s Harlem teetering on the brink of social upheaval, appeared in 1952, the United States was still a ‘Jim Crow’ nation.

Although hardly unique in this regard, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shows how affirming the capacity of a work to speak to all times (or, at the very least, to our own time) might stand at odds with understanding that work in its own moment.

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