Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Great Migration to White Flight

Abstract

Shortly after Ralph Ellison’s protagonist arrives in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a man wearing Charlie Chaplin pants, “pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper,” and singing a blues song that reminds the protagonist of home. Often read as a carrier of blues and vernacular traditions within the novel, Wheatstraw is also a literal carrier of building plans, all of which point to the ascendancy of Robert Moses and his New York City Slum Clearance Committee under the aegis of the Federal Housing Act of 1949. This chapter reads Ellison in relation to this emergent regime of post-war planning to suggest we think about Invisible Man not as a novel about a Jim Crow system passing into history, but about the tensions between the emergent racial regime of racial liberalism and white flight out of which neoliberalism would emerge.