Invisible Man, the title of Ralph Ellison’s seminal 1952 novel refers to the lack of opacity of its main protagonist. Rather than reading this book as the exemplary story of a concrete, situated individual – an African-American intellectual before and during the so-called Harlem Renaissance – this article-in-progress will concentrate on the figure of thought that this central character expresses.
Tag Archives: conceptual personae
new adventures in low-fidelity
This essay makes a case for media-epistemic pluralism, by staging an encounter between Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Ralph Ellison’s autobiographical story ‘Living with Music’. It argues that a medium does not function autonomously, but always forms a complex constellation with other media. This constellation takes shapes through the interventions of the conceptual persona of the engineer.
towards a new intellectual
A paper on Cornel West’s “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual” and Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On that I presented on the 25th of October 2006 at Princeton University during the ACLA Annual Meeting: The Human and its Others.