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Assimilation In Invisible Man

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"What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember." (Marcus Lee Hansen, 1938) Culture is literally a way of life. In this sense, culture is the totality of what we do with what we have learnt as a person in a certain society. Humankind has an ability of transmitting about what they learnt from their experiences to new generations after keeping in the culture. Consequently, it is considered as social memory which stores the common behavior patterns. Besides, throughout history, assimilation has frequently been encountered. Assimilation means the people who are ethnically diverse with each other starts to use common cultural values including language. Migrated people are the best candidates to be exposed to assimilation. These people have to continue their lives elsewhere as mandatory or optional from where their ancestors were born. They encounter with a range of serious problems in the new place. One of them is that clashing with new place, people and culture. Also, this clash is the source of the problem of the sense of belonging. Therefore, while assimilation is imposed on the immigrants, some negative results that are created by assimilation should not be ignored. Thus, all the immigrants should be allowed to retain …show more content…

In Invisible Man, Ellison (1980) emphasizes the importance of immigrants ' right that "When I discover who I am, I 'll be free" (p. 185). However, immigrants mostly have a supra identity due to assimilation. Oran (2012) interprets supra identity that "Attributed by the State to the citizen to build cohesion... Supra ID should be formulated in a way to make people say: 'This is MY country all right! '. For this, Supra Identity based on the ethnic understanding of citizenship, should be based on the territorial understanding of the term" (p. 3).Therefore, supra ID prevents being free

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