A peculiar sensation

Two Stages of Displacement: Shame and the Boomerang
There is always “a brooding strangeness,” Ellison writes, “in our 
intergroup familiarity” and “in our underlying sense of alienation a 
poignant—although distrusted—sense of fraternity.”
28
Addressing 
the rearguard work of cultural ambiguity that challenges the totaliz-
ing forms of America’s national narratives, Ellison’s essay, “The Little 
Man at Chehaw Station,”
29
further extends the concerns articulated 
two decades earlier in the novel that marked a turning point in Black 
American iction. “Black writing,” as Early points out, “became [now] 
less concerned with merely protesting racism or in asserting the hu-
manity of blacks and more interested in delineating African American 
characters as individuals engaged in distinct battles for meaning and 
unique struggles against the caprices of fate.”
30
However, what under-
lies the apparent existentialist topography of Ellison’s novel is perhaps 
not the concern with the constituent subject, but with the process of its 
constitution within a historical schema where racial formulas legislate 
for identity. While the possibility of being black and being American at 
the same time powers the political rhetoric of the hour, 
Invisible Man
does not only register its contradictions but wears away at any phantas-
matic centering of the heterogeneous play of forces that participate in 
the formation of the American subject. The novel traces the narrator’s 
emerging sense of displacement in the political terrain of radicalized 
racial attachments, leading to an exposure of subjectivity that exceeds 
unitary assignations to consistent social positions.
Trapped in a system of binary racial schemas that dominate the social 
and political realities of pre-Civil Rights America, the narrator’s subject 
formation is negotiated through a narrative succession of identity dis-
placements that provide the implicit structure of the novel. As a young 
and unsuspecting student backed up against the racial myths of the out-
side gaze, the narrator initially identiies with the phobic fantasies of 
whiteness and its normative demands as the legitimate carriers of agency, 
“show[ing] that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of prog-
ress,” for which he “was considered an example of desirable conduct…” 
(
IM
16–17). However, repeatedly disillusioned by the white disavowal of 
his initiatives upon his arrival to New York, he then reclaims his black 
skin, discovering a sense of self-identity in the very origins of his shame, 
but he does it by assuming the compensatory mask of Southern regional-
ism and by accommodating the historically determined representations 
of his black identity. The rhetoricity of subject formation represented by 
the irst two stages of displacement is then inally revealed by the end of 

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Black and Ashamed 
117
the novel with the narrator’s recognition of identity as a residual effect 
of racialized historical structures.
“Free of illusions” and “through [with] running” (569), the process 
of subjectivization for the narrator is inally unhinged by new forms 
of subjectivity that disarticulate visible identiicatory schemas but force 
him underground. What emerges underground, in the invisible basement 
section of a white-only apartment building where he inds his home, 
is a new temporality with no social space to accommodate its epiph-
any, as the vision of America, “woven of many strands” (577), coincides 
with the realization that identity is “one, and yet many” (569), subject 
to movement that resists conclusive representations of social existence. 
“This is not prophecy,” the narrator insists, “but description” (577), a 
reality beyond the politics of the imaginary that ixes its representation 
in visible oppositions. It is as yet invisible to history and literally con-
signed to its basement but it is “warm and full of light” (6), lit up by 
the narrator using “exactly 1,369 lights” (7) to manifest its blinding 
truth. Thus, “one of the greatest jokes in the world,” as he states in the 
Epilogue, “is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and 
becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, 
becoming quite dull and gray” (577). Ellison’s novel is an attestation to 
the fact that subjectivity is constituted in the interstices of identity cat-
egories and structural hierarchies that articulate the imperatives of our 
social life and the fact that we only ever exist at their limits at which we 
are exposed to one another.
Ironically, however, the irst two stages are accommodated by the 
public space, but the third drives him underground since the overlays of 
difference that (dis)articulate identity have no ield for disclosure in the 
social structure claustrophobically deined by ixed racial binaries. His 
claim for differential structure of identity and for the slippage of its sig-
niication as constitutively American is suppressed, or literally “clubbed” 
(572) down, by a reality produced through the racial imperatives that 
dictate social practice and totalize identity across its ield of differences. 
Coniding in the reader as “an invisible man,” which “placed … [him] 
in a hole,” the narrator concedes that “[o]nce you get used to it, the re-
ality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I 
caught the hint. Perhaps that’s the way that it had to be…” (572).
What is “clubbed” underground, however, is the narrator’s challenge 
to the regulatory law within which identity is constructed. It is a chal-
lenge that Bhabha, in different but related terms, argues still lies ahead 
of us
in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding as 
opening up a space that can accept and regulate the differential 
structure of the moment of intervention without rushing to produce 
a unity of the social antagonism and contradiction.
31

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