SOURCE: “He Speaks for Whom?: Inscription and Reinscription of Women in Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters,” in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 17-32.

In the following essay, Stanford analyzes the relationship between Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Bambara's The Salt Eaters.

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What happens to “the second sex” in a novel as powerful as Ellison's Invisible Man where the trope of invisibility functions as a critique of racist American society? When the text itself perpetuates the invisibility it seeks to undo, it seems inevitable that it will invite response and revision. In Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters we can discern an argument, not with Ellison's manifest text of invisibility and “the blackness of blackness,” but with the subtext of gender erasure.

African American feminist critics have, especially in the last fifteen or twenty years, articulated the problematic of double invisibility, the double jeopardy that results from being...