A peculiar sensation

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In 
The Souls of Black Folk
, W. E. B. Du Bois writes of “a peculiar 
sensation” in the affective life of the oppressed that pits the subject 
against itself: “It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking 
at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the 
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
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The con-
stitution of subjectivity taken hostage by the white gaze that Du Bois 
describes is further exposed as a structure of abiding ambiguity that 
reveals the Ego’s inability to assume its contradictions. “One ever feels 
his two-ness,” he continues, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two 
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark 
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
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This divided black soul, for Du Bois, constitutes both the living center of 
the American narrative and its unlivable margins at the same time. It is 
eminently American in the very possibility of its resistance to the objec-
tive racial myths within which it is determined, but it is also America’s 
constitutive outside, the excluded threshold of its identity.
The ambiguity of “double consciousness,”
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that in Du Bois’ writing 
powers the heteronomous constitution of the black subject and that I 
will argue is affectively articulated as racial shame, is what seesaws the 
nameless narrator in Ralph Ellison’s 
Invisible Man
(1952) between differ-
ent stages of racial displacement.
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The irst stage, identiied by Foucault 
as the process of subjectivization,
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is characterized by the introjection 
of the white gaze and its fantasies of racial difference, while the second 
is represented by its refusal, articulated in self-valorizing metaphysics 
of black nationalism and identity politics. Both are, however, revealed 
as displacements of subjectivity, determined within the narrow orbit of 
racial shame, and as reductive mystiications of partial and contradic-
tory structures of difference that participate in the subject formation. 
Both reproduce violence and reinforce the structures of invisibility that 
in the novel force black subjectivity underground. Continually at war 
with itself, as Du Bois suggests, the black psyche either assumes the 
objective structures of its own oppression or, summoned back by the 
contorted cries of history forced out of its lashed, black skin, it resists 
its own inevitable interpellation in the white narrative.
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Either way, it