A peculiar sensation

Invisible Man
by 
Ras the Exhorter, a “wild man” (364), a visionary and a rival leader of 
radical black separatism whose “hoodlums would attack and denounce 
the white meat of a roasted chicken” (365). Propelled into violence by 
the overwhelming historical forces, Ras is the inevitable effect of racial 
articulations of power. His charismatic, sectarian rhetoric, “wrong but 
justiied, crazy and yet coldly sane” (564), only relects the opposite end 
of the never-ending pendulum of racial politics that tears through the 
social terrain of America. After an attempt by the narrator to wrestle 
Harlem and its community leaders from Ras to support the more concil-
iatory and racially integrative cause of the Brotherhood, Ras’s poignant 
appeal quickly exposes the double consciousness of the black subject and 
the inherent complicity of the Brotherhood in the continuing oppression 
of black lives:
You 
my
brother mahn! Brothers are the same color; how the hell you 
call these white men 
brother
?… We sons of Mama Africa, you done 
forgot? You black, BLACK!… You got bahd 
hair
! You got thick 
lips
! 
They say you 
stink
! They hate you mahn. You African. AFRICAN! 
Why you with them?… They enslave us—you forget that?… What 
you trying to deny by betraying the black people?… In Africa this 
mahn be a chief, a black king! Here they say he rape them godhahm 
women with no blood in their veins… What kind of foolishness is 
it? Kick him ass from cradle to grave then call him 
brother
?… Is 
that sanity? Is that consciousness … the modern black mahn of the 
twentieth century? Hell, mahn!… He got you so you don’t trust your 
black intelligence… Don’t deny you’self!… It’s three hundred years 
of black blood to build this white mahn’s civilization and wahn’t be 

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120
Zlatan Filipovic
wiped out in a minute. Blood calls for blood! You remember that. 
And remember that I’m not like you. Ras recognizes the true issues 
and he is not afraid to be black. Nor is he a traitor for white men.
(370–71, 372, 373, 376)
Ras sees “the true issues” in the open relation of forces unmystiied by 
the protean forms of racial discrimination. For Ras, the black subject can 
only emerge in the positive expression of real antagonism that reconsti-
tutes agency through an absolute rejection of the white narrative within 
which it has been determined. This “boomerang” moment, in Sartre’s 
terms,
40
of racial disavowal that inds legitimacy in the self-valorizing 
rhetoric of the Négritude movement and pan-African essentialisms is 
necessary, according to Fanon, since it rehabilitates the past from the 
black pit of shame where it has been buried alive and triggers a funda-
mental change in the “psycho-affective equilibrium”
41
of the oppressed. 
Indeed, Ras could be seen as part of the counterhegemonic struggle over 
representation and meaning of the black past that has been scandalized 
within the racial schema upon which the white subject founds its prerog-
atives. When racial riots, instigated by Ras the Exhorter – who by the 
end of the novel becomes Ras the Destroyer – inally take possession of 
Harlem, he appears on
a great black horse. A new Ras of a haughty, vulgar dignity, dressed 
in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain [with] a fur cap upon his 
head, his arm bearing a shield [and with] a cape made of the skin of 
some wild animal around his shoulders.
(
IM
556)
“A igure,” the narrator continues, “more out of a 
dream
than out of 
Harlem … yet real, alive, alarming” (556, emphasis added). Making 
visible the suppressed black past uncannily claiming ownership of the 
present, Ras seems to stagger reason itself, but that is only because the 
history of 
reason
is white.
Ras, however, does not only expose the brutal residues of racial shame 
no longer blushing for its indiscretions, but also represents the narrator’s 
own cresting ambivalence between his formal pledge to the organized 
cause of the Brotherhood and his affective pledge to the suffering of 
the black community. The two do not coincide, “[t]he Brotherhood isn’t 
the Negro people” (468), and, with its overbearing, teleological abstrac-
tions, the Brotherhood runs aground against the throb of Harlem, its 
“raw materials” (472), its “gin mills and the barber shops and the juke 
joints and the churches … the beauty parlors on Saturdays when they’re 
frying hair … and a cheap tenement at night … [where a] whole unre-
corded history is spoken…” (471). To the Brotherhood and its cyclopean, 
one-eyed leader Jack, they are only “the mistaken and infantile notions 

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