A peculiar sensation

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
(New York: Cavendish 
Square Publishing, 2009), 56.
31 For Bhabha, the moment of deconstruction that, in this case, I associate with 
the narrator’s prophetic challenge to the discursive categories that articulate 
his social existence, is the moment of 
proper
political intervention. “The 
language of critique,” as Bhabha explains in “The Commitment to Theory,” 
and that I see manifested in Ellison’s writing, “is effective not because it 
keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist 
and the Marxist, 
but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds 
of opposition
and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, ig-
uratively speaking, where the construction of a political subject that is new, 
neither the one nor the other
, properly alienates our political expectations, 
and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment 
of politics.” Homi K. Bhabha, 
The Location of Culture
, 2nd ed. (London: 
Routledge, 2004), 37, emphasis added.
32 Bhabha, 
The Location of Culture
, 2004, 37.
33 Cf. Paul Gilroy’s discussion of Richard Wright and his increasing critical 
investment in the differentiation of the black subject in 
The Black Atlan-
tic
. Paul Gilroy, 
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 153.
34 Du Bois, 
The Souls of Black Folk
, 124.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Frantz Fanon, 
Black Skin, White Masks
, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: 
Grove Press, 2008), 80.
38 Du Bois, 
The Souls of Black Folk
, 108.
39 Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” 509.
40 In his “Preface” to 
The Wretched of the Earth
, Sartre argues, with Fanon, 
that the savagery of the oppressed, witnessed in the violent spasms of eman-
cipation, is nothing but the oppressor’s savagery turned against himself. The 
“boomerang … lies right back at us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any 
more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it.” Frantz 
Fanon, 
The Wretched of the Earth
, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove 

---

Black and Ashamed 
131
Press, 2004), liv. Hardt and Negri call this same moment “the boomerang 
of alterity” or the “inversion of the colonialist logic itself,” which they, nev-
ertheless, see as illusory, since it reappropriates the racial inheritances it is, 
at the same time, committed to abolishing. Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio 
Negri, 
Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 130, 131.
41 Fanon, 
The Wretched of the Earth
, 148.
42 For Fanon, this desire is a direct effect of the social imperative to “‘whiten 
or perish’” and is pathological since it creates a fantasy of identiication, 
“hallucinatory lactiication,” that leverages black subjectivity against itself. 
Not internally determined, it has its origin in “the real source of conlict,” 
which, for Fanon, is “the social structure” that “proclaims the superiority 
of one race over another” and makes “inferiority complex possible.” Fanon, 
Black Skin, White Masks
, 80.
43 In 
The Souls of Black Folk
, Du Bois exposes the deep-lying laws in the 
accommodationism of Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” that “counsels 
submission to civic inferiority” for the beneit of economic self-suficiency. 
“In counselling patience and courtesy” in demands for civic and political 
equality, “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of 
adjustment and submission,” practically accepting “the alleged inferiority 
of the Negro races” that should focus “all their energies on industrial edu-
cation, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.” For 
Du Bois, Washington’s “gospel of Work and Money” represents the “civic 
death” of black America, while it also surreptitiously legitimizes the contin-
ued persistence of racial discrimination. Du Bois,