A peculiar sensation

 Zlatan Filipovic
The ambiguity of subject positions reveled in Ellison’s novel and the 
ambivalence that belies their enunciation tear a hole in the racial fab-
ric of American history, “a hole in the ground” (
IM
6), and upset the 
relations of force that determine the narrator’s present. Ellison’s novel 
is emancipatory in Rancière’s sense since it 
intervenes
in the process 
of subjectivization to expose the unseen records of subjectivity that the 
discursive order, which legislates for visibility, for what can be seen, for 
what constitutes the thresholds of public space, cannot yet register but 
has to accommodate in order to account for the historical transforma-
tion of its own limits. “This is a sign,” in Bhabha’s terms, “that history 
is 
happening
.”
32
In his collection of essays 
White Man, Listen!
, Richard Wright argues 
that the “differences between the groups we know as races are associ-
ated with the repression of differences within those races.”
33
Totalizing 
binary structures that in the process of subjectivization rely on racial 
representativeness arrest the play of these differences and, by the same 
token, produce affective economies in which subjectivity is constrained 
to assume the burden of the oppositional logic within which it is artic-
ulated. One of the primary expressions of this burden is racial shame.
In both stages of the narrator’s displacement, shame is present as 
the very exposure of his blackness to the normativizing 
knowledge 
of the white gaze. Structural racialization and its production of 
legiti-mate social bodies through valorizing practices and normative 
con-straints of racial laws produces shame in the black subject by 
the very materialization of those laws and the compulsory 
identification with its normative demands. Internalized racial 
normativity corners the black psyche and mobilizes its last-ditch 
defenses to reclaim and emancipate itself in the stratagems of 
identification. In the absence of political defense, as Du Bois 
argues, “there is a patent defense at hand,—the defense of deception 
and flattery, of cajoling and l ying.”
34
The appropriation of the white 
disavowal and the artifice of identify-ing with the attitudes and 
sensibilities imposed by the white hegemony offer the privilege of 
social mobility for the black subject: “Patience, humility, and 
adroitness, must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, 
manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an
economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without 
this there is riot, migration, or crime.”
35
Hypocrisy and opportun-
ism of the oppressed, however, are not in any sense particular to the 
American South for Du Bois; “is it not rather the only method,” he 
asks rhetorically, “by which undeveloped races have gained the right 
to share modern culture?”
36
What remains unconsidered in this re-
spect is the fact that the interiorized racial oppression also offers a 
fantasy of self-approval. The desire for whiteness, for “lactification”
37
in Fanon’s terms, in a society where “color … settle[s] a man’s convic-
tion,”
38
is a desire for self-approval.

---

Black and Ashamed 
119
However, racial shame is not only related to the introjection of the 
white imaginary by the black subject, but is also deeply implicated in 
the opposite malaise of self-valorizing investments in racial difference 
where it is reclaimed as pride in order to reconstitute the narrative of 
black identity. The violence of black nationalism and the myopia of iden-
tity fetishism that the black psyche can leverage in order to contest the 
identiicatory processes of internalized oppression share the same basic 
assumptions with the essentialist fantasies of white power. The mystify-
ing representations of black otherness are reclaimed and fundamentally 
reafirmed in what Ellison regards as the gloriication of “blood think-
ing” and “ethnic (and genetic) insularity.”
39
Idolizing the commonal-
ity of slavery that provides the connective tissue for the heterogeneity 
of black experience does, however, confer legitimacy and provide his-
torical continuity for broken and disavowed black lives. It enables the 
emergence of much needed self-consciousness, racial identiication and 
political leverage, but it also totalizes identity and arrests the play of 
differences internal to it.
Black nationalism is mobilized and represented in