First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. The original edition includes a consideration of the work of her mother, the artist Faith Ringgold; recollections of her early life in Harlem; an account of her development as a writer in the 1970s, and investigations if the legacy of black artists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Spike Lee and Michael Jackson. To this long-awaited new edition, Michele Wallace has added an extensive introduction, as well as some photographs from her family’s collection documenting the 1970s and 80s.

Michele Wallace asks the tough questions that any book about the black experience of America must address, and this new edition of Invisibility Blues will challenge and inform a new audience with the combination of literary flair and scholarly rigor that has made it an acknowledged classic.

“Michele Wallace keeps her eyes open and her wits about her. Scrupulously fair, honest, clever and wise.” — Angela Carter

“Invisibility Blues is a warm book, even a hopeful one. Simultaneously confident and vulnerable, full of hard-earned insights into American culture and un-starry-eyed evaluations of the available role models, it is the unfinished saga of a proud outsider trying to make a place for herself and her sisters.” — Lucy R. Lippard, Transition

“Invisibility Blues shows why Michele Wallace has long been at the forefront of African-American cultural criticism.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Michele Wallace is one of the most talented and provocative cultural critics now writing in the USA. Listen and learn!” — Cornel West


Michele Wallace, who completed her PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1999, is Professor of English at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her seminal Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman is also available from Verso.		 Publication
July 2005
2nd Edn.: July 2008

384 pages
12 b/w illustrations

Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 286 8
US$110 / £60 / CAN$121

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 487 8
US$21.95 / £12.99 / CAN$24