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 late 2011 when I consulted with the Court Theatre in Chicago on its world-premiere adaptation of Invisible Man for the stage, I realised that my role would not be, as is so often the case in adaptations, to figure out how to make this ‘classic’ text relevant to the present. Instead, out of what some might see as a misguided fealty to the concept of historical change, I tried to become a force of defamiliarisation: yes, the world we live in now was powerfully shaped by the society that produced the sensibilities of a writer like Ellison. But it is not a world in which a power-hungry college president can hold sway over a politically silenced black population.

Ellison’s Bledsoe – who the protagonist affirms “was more than just a president of a college. He was a leader, a ‘statesman’ who carried our problems to those above us, even unto the White House; and in days past he had conducted the president himself about the campus. He was our leader and our magic, who kept the endowment high, the fund for scholarships plentiful and publicity moving through the channels of the press” – is no longer a contemporary type. He was a creature of disfranchisement, a political fact that made a mere audience with a US president momentous and the possibility of becoming president sheer fantasy. Our world is not his. Nor is ours a world in which the notion of a ‘black community’, despite the frequency with which the term is used to describe the collective responses and wants of US blacks, can do anything but misrepresent a population that, as pointed out to me recently by the University of Illinois Chicago scholar Cedric Johnson, is larger than the entire nation of Canada.