This sense that we are not contending with a new set of social and political circumstances, but are rather, reexperiencing what’s already happened, has become pervasive in some quarters.

In doing so, it was perhaps like Ellison’s nameless protagonist, disappearing only to resurface in a different guise in the 1980s and 1990s through aggressive, racially targeted policing and sentencing, the goal of which was to reduce much of the US black population to a status verging on, if not identical with, that which blacks experienced from the 1890s through to the 1950s.

If Ellison is a Jim Crow author, then he’s a man of our moment, if we are to believe, as Michelle Alexander affirmed in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colour-Blindness, that Jim Crow did not crumble under the assault of the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s, but rather merely went underground. Even so, some of his utterances from that period – for example his observation in his essay Society, Morality and the Novel that “it was the existence of human slavery and colonial exploitation which made possible many of the brighter achievements of modern civilisation” – now make him feel quite timely. It is true that during the 1970s heyday of Black Power and Black Arts, Ellison’s embrace of a Western cultural lineage for his art placed him at odds with many vocal partisans of the Black Aesthetic. Old news, though, is hardly the phrase one associates with Invisible Man these days. But the decision itself, which would declare unconstitutional the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’, was still a couple of years off. In the years that Ellison wrote his novel, the political and social agitation and decisions in lower court cases that would lead to the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v Board of Education had already signalled that a major social change might be imminent.

Although the rigour with which the dictates of this regime were enforced varied from time to time and place to place, the society in which Ellison came of age was one where openly discriminatory actions and policies had the sanction of both law and custom. When Ellison’s novel, which chronicled the erratic journey of its unnamed protagonist from the segregated American South to New York City’s Harlem teetering on the brink of social upheaval, appeared in 1952, the United States was still a ‘Jim Crow’ nation. Although hardly unique in this regard, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shows how affirming the capacity of a work to speak to all times (or, at the very least, to our own time) might stand at odds with understanding that work in its own moment.

Invisible man by ralph ellison