A peculiar sensation

Black and Ashamed 
125
Desperate to reclaim a sense of mastery and possession, the narrator 
quickly resorts to the strategies of renegriication of the world:
Perhaps … the whole thing should roll off me like drops of water 
rolling off Jack’s glass eye. I should search out the proper political 
classiication, label Rinehart and his situation and quickly forget 
it… I wanted to back away from it … to consult someone who’d tell 
me it was only a brief, emotional illusion. I wanted the props put 
back beneath the world.
(498, 500)
The fantasies of identity, propping the world back up, are provided on a 
regular basis in the Brotherhood by its “chief theoretician” (357) Brother 
Hambro, a white lawyer and an ideological advisor whose mind was 
“too narrowly logical” (500) to consider the legitimacy of what escapes 
it. For Brother Hambro, “scientiic necessity” requires “the weak … 
[to] sacriice for the strong” (503). Due to new political alliances of the 
Brotherhood, the narrator’s district with its disaffected members was 
to be renounced for the interests of the cause. Having no affective con-
tent that would split objectivity and make it alive, the decision is justi-
ied in good conscience by the perfunctory abstractions of teleological 
narratives:
a part of the whole is sacriiced—and will continue to be until a new 
society is formed … the aggressiveness of the Negroes … [will] now 
have to slow … down for their own good. It’s a scientiic necessity… 
They can’t be allowed to upset the tempo of the master plan.
(503, 504)
For the narrator, however, the living drama of the split subject is staged 
alongside the main drag of history, in its back alleys that open up dead ends 
and snags the hegemonic logics of the present cannot account for. “For 
him it was simple,” as the narrator explains. “For 
them
it was simple. But 
hell, I was 
both
. Both sacriicer and victim. That was reality too, my real-
ity. He didn’t have to put the knife blade to his 
own
throat” (506). Reality, 
for the narrator, emerges instead in the immanent state of contradictions 
contained in the techniques of power that determine the binarisms of his 
social existence but that remain only implicit in the expository narratives 
based on antagonisms that power the dialectic of progress. The narrator’s 
refusal to abide by any determined assignations of identity brings this di-
alectic to a standstill, pointing towards alternative presents unseen in the 
binary articulations of his own. Indeed, as Foucault suggests,
[m]aybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to
refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we

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126
Zlatan Filipovic
could be to get rid of this kind of political ‘double bind,’ which is the 
simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power 
structures.
50
Invisibility, in the novel, is a metaphor
of 
disclosure of these contradic-
tions and a waste product of the process of subjectivization that calls 
for a historical transformation of the subject. The invisible subject is in 
every sense an unpresupposable subject, a “singularity without identity,” 
in Agamben’s terms,
51
that cannot be thematized by the reductive ty-
pologies of the present, its “proper political classification[s]” (
IM
498), 
but that emerges from within its contradictions. In “The Little Man at 
Chehaw Station,” Ellison provides a graphic image of an unpresuppos-
able subject that for him suggests “new possibilities of perfection.”
52
Writing against “the ethnic sanctity”
53
and the inherited absolutisms 
of racial difference, Ellison is “reminded of a light-skinned, blue-eyed, 
Afro-American-featured individual who could have been taken for any-
thing from a sun-tinged white Anglo-Saxon, an Egyptian, or a mixed-
breed American Indian to a strayed member of certain tribes of Jews.”
54
“This young man,” he continues,
appeared one sunny Sunday afternoon on New York’s Riverside 
Drive near l51st Street, where he disrupted the visual peace of the 
promenading throng by racing up in a shiny new blue volkswagen 
Beetle decked out with a gleaming Rolls Royce radiator. As the low 
of strollers came to an abrupt halt, this man of parts emerged from 
his carriage… Clad in handsome black riding boots and fawn-colored 
riding breeches of English tailoring, he took the curb wielding—with 
an ultra-pukka-sahib haughtiness—a leather riding crop. A dashy 
dashiki … lowed from his broad shoulders down to the arrogant, 
military lare of his breeches-tops, while … a black Homburg hat, 
tilted at a jaunty angle, loated majestically on the crest of his huge 
Afro-coiffed head. As though all this were not enough to amaze, 
delight, or discombobulate his observers—or precipitate an interna-
tional incident involving charges of a crass invasion of stylistic bound-
aries—he proceeded to unlimber an expensive Japanese single-lens 
relex camera, position it atop the ornamental masonry balustrade 
which girds Riverside Park in that area, and activate its self-timer. 
Then, with a ballet leap across the walk, he assumed a position be-
side his car … [and] began taking a series of self-portraits… viewed 
from a rigid ethno-cultural perspective, neither his features, nor his 
car, nor his dress was of a whole. Yet he conducted himself with an 
obvious pride of person … inviting all … [to] wonder in response to 
himself as his own sign and symbol, his own work of art… And his 
essence lay, not in the somewhat comic clashing of styles, but in the 
mixture, the improvised form, the willful juxtaposition of modes.
55

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