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HSUAN HSU Regarding Mimicry: Race and Visual Ethics in Invisible Man From slave narratives to videotapes of police brutality, public representations of blacks in America often turn on issues of spectacle , witness, and surveillance—issues relating to an often racist or at least racially determined gaze. But critics often stop at an admittedly justified focus on the objectifying and oppressive aspects of visual representation , without discussing what an ethical form of visual practice might look like. Thus, Herman Beavers coins the term "racial gaze" to designate "a mode of voyeurism that takes on aoristic significance in the context of nineteenth-century American racial relations"; and Ellison criticism is filled with references to white scopophilia and visual objedification—as is much of Invisible Man itself (Beavers 205).' But, in addition to enforcing relations of inequality, the gaze can bear witness to such relations in transformative ways. Hortense Spillers's caveat that the culture worker needs to "break through the 'perceptual cramp' that focuses his/her eyeball on 'The Man' " suggests that simply to dismiss the visual is not sufficient: instead, we need to focus on an "ethical and restorative" social practice that often assumes the specular and intersubjective form of"giving oneselfto be looked at" (96). Claudia Tate issues a similar warning about the "protocols of race" under which "we readers and scholars—black and nonblack—generally expect literary works and critical studies by African Americans to contest racist perspectives and the resulting oppression" (3); "By repeatedly inscribing the negative effects of racism on black characters, the modernist black Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 Hsuan Hsu text perpetuates fantasies of white power and black victimization" instead of looking at the concrete practices and desires of black subjects (18). Such warnings against what Martin Jay has called the "denigration of vision" in twentieth-century theory suggest that the notion of a panoptic "facial gaze" allows space only for a politics of partial subversion or what Homi Bhabha calls colonial "mimicry." Invisible Man, however, ultimately aligns "denigration"2 not with the visual hut with invisibility as such. In doing so, the novel pushes towards alternative leadings of passages in the work of Lacan and Fanon that outline an ethics of visuality, an ethics that pursues heterogeneous alliances rather than the fixed terms of identity politics. I. NARCISSISM AND THE RACIAL GAZE The visual regime of racism is twofold: on the one hand, identification involves narcissistic and often hostile projections on the side of both white and black subjects; on the other hand, surveillance afflicts blacks with the oppressive sense that they are being watched by a critical and ubiquitous white gaze. Racist whites narcissistically project undesirable traits—such as the sense ofphysical contingency which Lacan describes as "the body-in-bits-and-pieces" [corps morcelé]—upon black bodies: thus they identify negatively as what blacks are not, and Ellison 's narratot feels like a bodiless head "surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass" in which people "see only my surroundings, themselves , or figments of their imagination" (3). As a result of such racist projections, blacks are susceptible to both the over-identification with white ideals which Ellison's protagonist often feels and the counteridentification which fuels the racial nationalist crusade against any interaction whatsoever with whites. Surveillance, the other visual mechanism of racial oppression, elides the distinction between white people's looks and the structural intervention in the field of vision which Lacan calls "the gaze" by framing black bodies as the objects of a panoptic white gaze: hence the Invisible Man's nagging sense that (his invisibility notwithstanding) he's secretly being watched. According to Fanon, the problem of racism in the post-colonial context is structured by the dynamics of narcissism: "The white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness. We shall seek to ascertain the directions of this double narcissism [and] attempt a Race and Visual Ethics in Invisible Man109 complete lysis of this morbid body [univers morbide]" (Black Skin 9-10, Peau noire 26).' Later in Biack Skin, White Masks, a long footnote gestures towards the investigation of interracial...

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