Caribbean news. Ralph Ellison was concerned in the 1950s about giving visibility to the invisible people – African-Americans in the USA – and the legacy of his work has resonance in the present as regards the invisibility of Black people on Britain’s television and cinema screens, especially in this modern televisual age.
30th May was 100 years since the birth of the American author Ralph Ellison in 1914 and 2014 is over half a century since his seminal novel “Invisible Man” was published in 1952.
Simon Albury and Ralph Ellison on the right Photo courtesy James Whitmore and CaribDirect
Yet that novel – the story of how Black people exist but remain invisible and unseen in white countries – seems to have as much relevance now, six decades on as it did back then.
Ralph Ellison (pictured on the right in 1957) created a story that illustrated the reality of what happens to those who remain invisible and unseen and to those who are unseeing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man
Commentators have also drawn more current parallels of the modern invisibility as represented by Trayvon Martin and Magic Johnson.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/05/30/317056807/ralph-ellison-no-longer-the-invisible-man-100-years-after-his-birth
The Caribbean (In)Visibility seminar in December 2013 looked at the issue of the absence of the British-Caribbean and wider Black community from television and cinema screens in the UK.
http://www.sankofa-tv.co.uk/images/Visibility_Seminar_-_article_01.pdf
Simon Albury spoke on BBC Radio 4 (along with actor Gary Beadle) in January 2014 and then at the Royal Television Society in June 2014 about the ongoing invisibility and the intransigence against changing it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25839397
http://www.thetvcollective.org/2014/06/04/text-of-the-speech-given-by-simon-albury-to-the-creative-week-rtsbroadcast-diversify-event/
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