The eponymous protagonist of Gwendolyn Brooks’s under-examined 1953 novel Maud Martha becomes acutely attuned to the multisensory dimensions of quotidian experience. As she navigates the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, and color in the public sphere, she begins to conceive of herself as a perceiving subject rather than solely as a perceived object in the private sphere. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, I theorize synesthetic stillness as an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through its exploration of overlapping and intermingling perceptual faculties. In deploying synesthetic stillness, Brooks not only counters dehumanizing sensory stereotypes, but traces a mode of Black resistance that privileges internal sensation rather than external expression.

The political significance of Invisible Man’s literary aesthetics has long been contested. In the dominant narrative, Ellison is a model minority endorsing ‘vital center’ liberalism and anticommunism; revisionary scholarship has insisted on a muted but nonetheless influential relationship to the Left. Regardless, debates have consistently reproduced readings that submit to Cold War ideological imperatives. By tracking this critical genealogy and its limitations from the 1950s to the present, and incorporating recent theorizations of ‘black interiority,’ this chapter recasts the political significance of Ellisonian aesthetics—a project dedicated not to confirming, but rather dissenting from the Cold War’s hegemonic political binary.