Monitoring the gaze: Strategic (in)visibility and resistance in <i>Invisible Man</i> and <i>Home Fire</i>

This article investigates how marginalized subjects calibrate visibility under shifting regimes of racialized surveillance, comparing Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man with Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Drawing on surveillance studies and Judith Butler’s notion of “performativity”, it examines (in)visibility as a generative field of negotiation rather than a purely imposed condition. The article argues that racialized subjects in both novels do not merely endure the surveilling gaze, they strategically monitor and control their own visibility to articulate identity. By theorizing (in)visibility as a dynamic process, this article bridges surveillance and postcolonial studies, offering a framework for analysing control from the modern to the digital era. It concludes that while strategic calibrations momentarily disrupt dominant surveillance, these tactics are eventually reabsorbed by dominant power structures. Ultimately, both texts reveal the limits of individual transgression, pointing instead towards an ethics of opacity as a collective challenge to the transparency demanded by racialized surveillance.