Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

"We Share a Common Disinheritance": Subjectivity, Dispossession, and Antiblackness in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Paul Beatty's The Sellout

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  • Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at the level of ontology. Through a close examination of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, this thesis suggests that the dispossessive violence of antiblackness presents a formidable challenge to an ethics based in relationality. This thesis also attends to the way these novels attempt to theorize black being beyond this violence. I position these novels together because they share a common concern for the possibility of subjectivity and resistance amid a normative antiblackness. Their formal similarities also undercut narratives of racial progress in order to show that antiblack racism is a problem fundamental to modern notions of the human. While neither novel attempts to solve the problem of antiblackness, their attempts to gesture to new forms of subjectivity open the path toward more generative resistance.
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  • 2019-06-05 to 2021-07-06
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