Article: Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.(Critical Essay)

The element of carnival-masquerade offers a wide lens through which to view black-white race relations by mirroring and magnifying racial practices in the United States. Perhaps no work of African American literature exemplifies this point more sharply than Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), which intensifies the narrator's perceptions of race by viewing various images of whiteness and blackness through carnival's distorted mirrors. (1) While this grotesque exaggeration reflects the particularly jaundiced twentieth-century condition of race in the United States, it also involves a re-assessment of carnivalesque perception itself, for precisely in the simultaneously ...

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