A peculiar sensation

The Souls of Black Folk
, 
30–31, 32, 33.
44 In his essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault maintains that the 
body, far from being n(eu)atural, motivating foundationalist discourses and 
grand illusions of metaphysics, is radically historical, experienced 
as medi-
ated
through different stresses of its social history. For Foucault, it is the 
very articulation of history and the watershed of biopolitical disciplinary 
regimes. “The body,” he writes, “is the inscribed surface of events (traced 
by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting 
the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. 
Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation 
of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by 
history and the process of history's destruction of the body.” Michel Fou-
cault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in 
The Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul 
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 83.
45 Bhabha, 
The Location of Culture
, 2004, 104.
46 Upon his arrival in New York, the narrator resists the urge to conirm the 
fantasy of collective self-consistency assumed about the Black Belt by re-
fusing to take “the special” of “pork chops and grits” recommended by the 
counterman, opting instead for “orange juice, toast and coffee.” “You fooled 
me … I would have sworn you were a pork chop man.” Proud to differentiate 
himself from the racialized stereotype, the narrator considers this as “an act 
of discipline, a sign of change that was coming over [him]…” (
IM
178).
47 For Stuart Hall, the boomerang of the repressed is crucial in the struggle 
to transform “the dominant regimes of representation” and the “discursive 
spaces” that author for black experience. It enables “the 
contestation
of the 
marginality, the stereotypical quality, and the fetishized nature of images 
of blacks by the counterposition of a ‘positive’ black imagery.” He consid-
ers “these strategies … principally addressed to changing … ‘the relations 
of representation’” that “play a 
constitutive
, and not merely a relexive, 

---

132
Zlatan Filipovic
after-the-event, role.” Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in 
Black British Cul-
tural Studies: A Reader
, eds. Houston A. Baker Jr., et al. (Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996), 164, 165.
48 Bhabha, 
The Location of Culture
, 2004, 81.
49 Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 166.
50 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 336.
51 In 
The Coming Community
, Agamben calls for a community that has lost 
its presuppositions and its operative concepts of belonging. Its subjects are 
no longer subjects but “whatever singularities” that have no assignable prop-
erties, “that form a community without afirming an identity, that … co- 
belong without any representable condition of belonging.” Whatever-being, 
he explains,
has no identity, it is not determinate with respect to a concept … rather it 
is determined only through its relation to an 
idea
, that is, to the totality 
of its possibilities. Through this relation … singularity borders all possi-
bility and thus receives its … [determination] not from its participation 
in a determinate concept or some actual property (being red, Italian, 
Communist), but 
only by means of this bordering
.
Giorgio Agamben, 
The Coming Community
, trans.
Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 67, 86
52 Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” 511.
53 Ibid., 509.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 509–11.
56 Ibid., 511.
57 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 336.
58 Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” 511.
59 In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault is interested in sites “that have the cu-
rious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a 
way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they hap-
pen to designate, mirror, or relect.” In relation to utopias, these are “real 
places … which are something like counter-sites,” immanent to all political 
structures, and “a kind of effectively enacted utopia[s] in which the real 
sites … are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted… Because 
these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they relect and 
speak about, I shall call them … heterotopias.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other 
Spaces,”
Diacritics
16, no. 1 (1986): 24.