He says that because of his invisibility, he has been hiding from the world, living. His invisibility, he says, is not a physical conditionhe is not literally invisiblebut is rather the result of the refusal of others to see him. The, sort of, subtleties of discrimination are really shown in this book. The narrator begins telling his story with the claim that he is an invisible man. Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeRalph Elllisons Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. And so, what is happening in the '90s and 2000s is something that's being portrayed in this book, sometimes in a sort of exaggerated way, but in many cases, in a really true-to-life way, as well. And so, the main protagonist of the book is a temporary worker in a government office who is confronted by a Han boss who's always seeing him as less than the other workers in the office. In Invisible Man, the situation of white women is drawn parallel to that of black menboth are oppressed by white male society. The '90s is when there was a large population of Han Chinese people, which was the majority group, moving into the Uyghur region, and really beginning to transform the Uyghur countryside, sort of overwhelming Uyghur villages, taking the land and then capturing their institutions, the banking system, the education system, the government offices. Home / Literature / Invisible Man / Themes. ![]() And I think, most of what he wrote in the '90s stays true to the present. So, he had written it, but it hadn't been published. And it really got its first public circulation only in 2012. Well, Perhat started writing this book back in the '90s, but he has actually been editing it all along the way. Coetzee's work, "The Life & Times of Michael K." It's showing what oppression feels like, how it's lived, and how people survive it, and using a lot of humor as it does that by showing all of the absurdities of life in those conditions. ![]() It's called 'The Backstreets.'" And so, that's how I got interested in it, started reading it and then realized, "Oh, this is a work of world literature that really deserves translation and deserves a broader audience." He's working in the same themes as great works of literature like "The Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison or J. So, I'd been interviewing those folks and I was speaking to someone who was a friend of Perhat's, and he said, "Oh, Perhat has written a book that's sort of on this theme, you should read it. What kind of experiences young people have when they come to the city from rural villages, from the Uyghur countryside. I first learned about Perhat's work over a decade ago, but didn't know about this particular novel, "The Backstreets," until 2014, which is when I was doing ethnographic fieldwork in the region and was researching migration to the city.
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