In the 60 year span between the publication of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) and the present day, the metaphor of invisibility, initially used by Ellison to describe the feeling that black Americans had of being second class citizens, has been taken up and applied to other minority groups both inside and outside the US. Set in pre-civil rights America, Ralph Ellison’s novel chronicles the trajectory of a black man who is aware that his ethnic conspicuousness consigns him to social invisibility in the eyes of white Americans with racial prejudices. The novel, which provides an insightful entry point into the complex dynamics of racial otherness evidences some of the salient traits of ethnic visibility turned into metaphorical invisibility as well as the contextual makeup and psychological consequences of the de facto ‘invisibility’ of the ethnically conspicuous other. The metaphorical meaning endorsed by visibility in this reputedly seminal text on race relations has traversed the fields of ethnic studies and postcolonial writing either explicitly or in a slightly more veiled manner. More recently the notion has been theorized by French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc who acknowledges his intellectual debt to Ellison whilst probing further into the workings of social invisibility. In his book L’Invisibilité Sociale (Social Invisibility),² Le Blanc lays the foundations for a study devoted to the forms and workings of invisibility; he also takes account of some of the methodological difficulties and potential pitfalls inherent in studying invisibility from the vantage point of academic disciplines; yet he asserts the potential of invisibility as a fully-fledged category in academic discourse.

Among the various forms of invisibility, economic invisibility probably illustrates best the discrepancy between social conspicuousness and actual socio-economic impact. A classic example of economic invisibility is that of the ‘informal sector’, a formulation first employed by anthropologist Keith Hart in 1973, who was working on the urban poor in India. Hart’s groundbreaking inquiry into the invisible masses has paved the way for subsequent studies into other aspects of the shadow class. Among them is the work of anthropologist Breman, who studied the agrarian economy of several villages in south Gujarat (India) which he visited over a number of years.⁷ Breman was curious to find out what the people pushed out of agriculture became and to map their trajectory, which involved inquiring into their geographic and economic move away from agriculture. Both Hart’s and Breman’s work can be transposed from the rural and agrarian economies to the urban economy as well as to wider contexts and offer global paradigms. The masses in question can indeed be numbered in millions rather than in thousands, and the much publicized phenomenon of sweatshops in the southern hemisphere barely conceals an even more dramatic reality. Although figures fluctuate, and should therefore be viewed with a certain critical distance, the numbers involved are impressive; according to Mike Davis⁸ ‘the global informal working class [ . . . ] is about one billion strong, making it the fastest-growing, and most unprecedented social class on earth’ (Davis, 2006, 178). Davis’s pessimistic outlook on the growth of the informal sector is corroborated by many cultural analysts, including anthropologist Arjun Appadurai who has denounced the paradox of the economic growth of India going hand in hand with certain specificities of the Indian context, like child labour, which are generally deemed unacceptable in our day and age. Appadurai stresses the fact that in Bombay, a large part of the food service economy is dependent on child labour: ‘although Mumbai boasts of its high levels of school attendance, its gigantic restaurant and food service economy [is] almost completely dependent on a vast army of child labor’ (Appadurai, 2001, 27).⁹ These figures, which give some idea of the magnitude of the problem, do not necessarily spell out their human consequences as clearly as they might: among them are the economic exploitation of children, their lack of access to education, which in turn impacts on the literacy rate of a predominantly young population. In India still, the shadow class partly but not entirely overlaps with the population of slum dwellers, which poses the problem of their actual existence and territorialization, of their living conditions, of their health and safety, as well as of their prospects. Davis points out that ‘a recent study of slum children in Dhaka, for instance, discovered that ‘nearly half of boys and girls aged 10 to 14 were performing income-generating work’ and ‘only 7 percent of girls and boys aged 5 to 16 years attended school’. In her study of poverty in the Dhaka slums (Poverty and Vulnerability in Dhaka Slums, 2003) Jane Pryer traces the evolution of child labour in Bangladesh, its impact on the children but also the cultural reasons for child work,¹⁰ which as she insists is different from child labour¹¹ and needs to be recontextualized in a tradition of child–mother contact in female-headed families where children, especially girls, follow their mothers to work.¹² In 1994, according to the national census of the BBS, 12 percent of the Bangladeshi labour force was constituted of children under 14 years of age.¹³