A peculiar sensation

Black and Ashamed 
129
Notes
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, 
The Souls of Black Folk
(New York: Dover Publications, 
1994), 2.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ralph Ellison, 
Invisible Man
(London: Penguin Classics, 2001). Henceforth, 
IM
; all citations in the main text.
5 Discussing the possibility of resistance to the normalizing procedures of 
power, Foucault considers subjectivization in terms of assuming the re-
stricted notions of identity to which one is consigned by the individualizing 
strategies of power that “force the individual back on himself, and tie him 
to his own identity in a constraining way.” It is a technique of power, Fou-
cault further explains, that “applies itself to immediate everyday life [and] 
categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, 
attaches him 
to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize 
and others have to recognize in him.
It is a form of power which makes in-
dividuals subjects.” Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in 
Power: 
The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984
, vol. 3 of 
The Essential 
Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984
, ed. James D. Faubion, 3rd ed. (Lon-
don: Penguin, 2002), 330, 331, emphasis added.
6 For Du Bois, indeed, there are only two terms within which the persecuted 
black subject can be meaningfully articulated in racially determined social 
structure. The contradictory movement of subject formation is seen either in 
terms of “hypocritical compromise” or “radicalism:” “From the double life 
every American Negro must live … must arise a painful self-consciousness, 
an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy … [that] tempt 
the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism… The one 
type of Negro stands almost ready to curse God and die, and the other is too 
often found a traitor to right and a coward before force; the one is wedded 
to ideals remote, whimsical, perhaps impossible of realization; the other for-
gets that life is more than meat and the body more than raiment.” Du Bois, 
The Souls of Black Folk
, 122, 123.
7 Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” in 
The Collected Es-
says of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated
, ed. John Callahan, 2nd ed. 
(New York: Modern Library, 2003), 507.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 517.
10 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 336.
11 Ibid., 331, emphasis added.
12 Ibid., 331.
13 Aurelia Armstrong, “Beyond Resistance: A Response to ̌ǐek’s Critique of 
Foucault’s Subject of Freedom,” 
Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy
, 
no. 5 (2008): 20.
14 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 342.
15 Ibid., 340.
16 Ibid., 342.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identiication, and Subjectivization,”
October
61 
(1992): 60, emphasis added.
21 Ibid., 61.
22 Ibid., 61–62.

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130
Zlatan Filipovic
23 Ibid., 61.
24 Ibid., 62.
25 Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” 507.
26 Rancière, “Politics, Identiication, and Subjectivization,” 62, emphasis 
added.
27 Du Bois, 
The Souls of Black Folk
, 9.
28 Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” 508.
29 “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” is an essay irst published in 
The 
 American Scholar
in 1978 and later included in Ellison’s collection 
Going 
to the Territory
(1986). With the effects of the Civil Rights Movement still 
echoing through a racially torn and politically wounded America, the es-
say integrates Ellison’s aesthetic concerns within the broader political re-
ality of jealous cries for ethnic particularisms and for the prerogatives of 
blood that divest the American experience of its “wonder” and its “stubborn 
complexity.” The problem of identity is condensed in America’s “random 
assemblies of sensibilities,” where “even the most homogeneous gatherings 
of people are mixed and pluralistic.” For Ellison, however, this mystery of 
“Americanness” that resides in its ontological ambiguity, is worth keeping 
and “perhaps,” as he continues, it “arises out of our persistent attempts to 
reduce … [it] to an easily recognizable unity.” Ibid., 502, 504.
30 Gerald Lyn Early,